The MS Exchange Team Blog has spilled the beans. Biggest change (other than cross-browser support for OWA Premium) is the discontinuation of support for Single Copy Clustering (SCC). Other big changes include online mailbox moves, user-initiated message tracking, and elimination of storage groups.
InfoWorld has a nice overview.
The official MS site is here.
TechNet documentation is here.
MSDN docs are here.
The folks at Microsoft have made it pretty clear that they regard PowerShell (the scripting language formerly known as “monad”) as the future for managing their server products. Exchange 2007 was just the first wave, with the latest versions of SharePoint and SQL quickly following suite. When Windows Server 2008 R2 is released, it will be accompanied by PowerShell v2.0, which will include a whole new batch of AD management cmdlets (including one for un-deleting AD objects – yeah!), as well as a PSDrive provider which will allow the Active Directory to be accessed from PowerShell as if it were a filesystem.
Last week, I and several of my collegues had the good fortune to attend a PowerShell training class. Although I’ve been using PowerShell now for over a year to manage Exchange 2007, the class did provide a good opportunity to bone up on the fundamentals, and even helped me clear up some misconceptions that I had about how certain commands work. (ForEach and ForEach-Object are different commands? That explains a lot….)
For anyone interested in learning more about PowerShell, here are some good resources:
Sadly, UT’s WordPress implementation does not include support for LaTeX tags. I’ve submitted a suggestion to add such support. I’m thinking that it will greatly improve the appeal of this service to faculty and students in math, science, and engineering disciplines. I’ve also posted an example on WordPress.com of what such support can do.
If such support were in place, the following code would show the LaTeX logo:
$latex \LaTeX$
The next version of Exchange, E14, is in beta as part of Microsoft’s Live@EDU service. When it will go RTM is anybody’s guess. Rumors have been spilled that E14 will go RTM in October 2009, but there is no telling when it will actually drop.
Also in 2010, we’ll be facing the need to move our Exchange environment to a new data center. Plus, it would be nice to move the underlying OS from Windows Server 2003 to Server 2008 (2003 HA clusters can’t be upgraded in-place to 2008). I’ve been busily scheming to formulate devious plans which would allow us to accomplish both without an extensive outage or mass mailbox moves. Hint: it involves Standby Continuous Replication. Of course, any such schemes that I concoct now are subject to change once Microsoft finally announces the details of E14, including upgrade paths and supported configurations. They have been mum on both subjects thus far.
So, what will we get with E14? The biggest feature announced thus far is cross-platform support for OWA Premium, which would be of great benefit to the many Mac users in our environment (including me).