It seems that the Microsoft team and various other people are spending their holidays writing Exchange 2007 Powershell scripts. I love scripts but my first wish for this year is that Exchange 2007 expands its GUI.

Read more about the Scriptaculat demo pack here:

http://www.viveksharma.com/techlog/2006/12/21/anno...-pack/

and download it here:

http://www.viveksharma.com/techlog/attache/MS_Exch....0.zip

In the dangerous world of Internet e-mail relaying has been a tricky situation in recent years, even though Exchange 2000 and above were defaultly configured properly to avoid being used as mass mailers by 3rd pary mail bombers.

However, sometimes you did need to allow certain elemnts to relay through you. The first one for me was always the backup server, using SMTP to send and recieve messages, then the monitoring infrastracture, then certaing partner companies.

Guess what? This now not really easier but you have more options for controlling relaying with the new Exchange version.

Read more here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/28/432013.aspx

Remember ExMerge? Now you’ve got that same functionaliy, even somewhat improved with a cmdlet.

Read about it here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/18/431934.aspx

 As I mentioned before, we should probably see a few updates to Exchange 2007 and a sooner-than-expected SP1 due to the incomplete and buggy RTM version.

This is the first one, an update to Windows Server 2003 x64 to support large memory with Exchange 2007. How large is large? The KB is not published yet, but I bet that more than 3GB more is pretty large.

It appears that Microsoft is still vague about how large is large but the article says up to 2TB. Time to fetch more memory for my server. oooooh 2Terabytes. I could live with that.

KB:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918844 

 Download the patch here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa...ang=en

I am going to write an article soon about an actual Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 migration.

My first impression of Exchange 2007 - it still half baked in terms of GUI and some functionality. Not as bad as Exchange 2000 was, but still some things are missing. A lot of things can be done only via scripting or CLI (basically, a command prompt) which is really annoying and unlike Microsoft. I predict that a lot of these fatures will find themselves in GUI form when SP1 is released or via external tools.

More on this in my article when it is posted.

I really like the fact that I do not have to wait for shipping CDs/DVDs and can just get it when its RTMing and out.

get it here:

https://licensing.microsoft.com/eLicense/L1033/Pro...il.ASP

A unique blog on the actual creation of the new Outlook Web Access calendaring from its programmer. I still have not decided whether this is fascinating or really boring.

Read it here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/11/431858.aspx

 The fix is, for some reason, updated once again and available on the MS web site here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa...ang=en

Automating Exchange at the server level was not for the faint of heart. Writing transport sinks was difficult and debugging was even harder.

All this changes now with Exchange 2007 which provides better automation wiht transport rules from the GUI and also writing your own transport agents with .NET Framework 2.0 SDK, and Visual Studio 2005.

Read about it here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/04/431755.aspx

Over the years a couple of Exchange tools have been released. Their interface was almost never a contemporary one and they weren’t really updated regularly. With Exchange 2007 all these tools get a face lift. Some of them are already here, some will be released in the upcoming year.

For more information:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/excha...2.mspx