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Exchange 2007 is now on the street. With Exchange such a critical piece of a company's infrastructure, it is usually several months before organizations deploy a new release of this popular messaging system. While some of you may already have begun to consider it or are perhaps even further along the road to implementation, many have not.
We present here an overview of just some of the major features introduced with Exchange 2007, with a bit of an emphasis on the performance aspects. This is by no means an all-encompassing list of Exchange 2007 enhancements, but rather just an overview of some of the highlights.
Exchange Management Console
The new Exchange Management Console is based on Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0. The console is required to install and manage Exchange 2007. It combines all Exchange management tasks into one user interface, and allows Exchange administrators to manage all Exchange Servers, recipients and organizational components in the Exchange 2007 organization.
Exchange Management Shell
The Exchange Management Shell is a new task-based command line shell and scripting language for system administration. Exchange administrators can use the shell to perform every task that the Exchange Management Console can perform as well as additional tasks.
The idea is to provide IT administrators with a consistent and powerful experience, through script shell that is invoked through a command line utility or through the GUI. As an example, administrators can create scripts that will automatically provision users with mobile devices, create mailboxes, migrate information from the message store, and perform other tasks that would require lots of time to accomplish through the standard GUI.
Unified Messaging
Exchange 2007 includes support for Unified Messaging (UM), which combines multiple messaging infrastructures into a single messaging infrastructure. This means that Exchange users who are enabled for Unified Messaging can receive all voice mail, email, and fax messages in their Exchange 2007 mailboxes. They can also access their mailboxes from a variety of devices, such as mobile devices and cellular, analog and digital telephones.
Performance Improvements
Exchange 2007 supports deployment on a 64-bit architecture for improved performance and capacity. Because of the move from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture, the Enterprise Edition of Exchange Server 2007 now supports a larger number of storage groups and databases per server. Exchange 2007 lets administrators create as many as 50 storage groups per server. Although a storage group can contain as many as 5 databases, there is a limit of 50 databases per server.
High availability for Mailbox servers
Exchange 2007 includes three built-in features that provide high availability for Mailbox servers: Local continuous replication (LCR), cluster continuous replication (CCR), and single copy clusters (SCC). Sites can implement the scheme.
Message Policy and Compliance Features
Exchange 2007 includes many new messaging compliance features that allow administrators to apply rules to messages that are sent and to enforce retention requirements for stored data. A new Messaging Records Management (MRM) feature helps users and organizations retain the messages that they need for business or legal reasons.
Security
Exchange 2007 includes several improvements to the suite of anti-spam and antivirus features that were introduced in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. In Exchange 2007, the anti-spam and antivirus features provide services to block viruses and spam at the network perimeter.
Security for mobile devices has also been improved. Previously, a single policy was enabled for the whole Exchange Server. With Exchange 2007, it is now possible to create mobile policies for individual users or groups of users. This should positively impact PIN requirements, PIN length, login attempts, etc.
A Final Note - Space Still an Issue
One area that Exchange administrators continue to focus on is trimming or at least controlling the never-ending explosion of storage requirements for Exchange. The only way to do this - to obtain a smaller, faster and leaner Exchange database - is through regular compaction and defragmentation of Exchange data stores.
When messages and attachments are deleted from the database, the Exchange database doesn't actually shrink. The items that were removed no longer show up in mailboxes or on calendars, but the disk space they occupied is still part of the Exchange database. Those deleted areas are called "white space" and can be used again. Only compacting and defragmenting the database will truly recover the space. With a smaller and leaner Exchange database, it will not only perform better, but backups should also be faster.
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