Great news!!!
Exchange 2010 Beta is released,
Go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd185495.aspx for more details about the new version of Exchange,
You can download the Beta here :http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd185495.aspx
Mind the thing that Exchange 2010 runs only on 64-bit Machines so it is time to check out also Hyper-V in order to create your Lab environment to try the Beta.
Also while downloading you can check these Videos regarding Exchange 2010 :
http://edge.technet.com/Media/Whats-new-in-Unified-Messaging-in-Exchange-2010/
http://edge.technet.com/Media/Announcing-Exchange-2010-Beta/
Here are some of the new features in Exchange 2010:
Archiving and Retention
As the volume of e-mail continues to grow within organizations, the need to systematically archive this information has become a growing priority. Archiving can provide users a better e-mail experience by freeing up space inside a user's mailbox for better performance. Archiving also helps the organization better address compliance and legal electronic discovery requirements by making e-mail easier to manage and search. To address these needs, Exchange Server 2010 now features new archiving capabilities that combine with other enhanced mailbox management features, including advanced, multi-mailbox search, legal hold and granular retention polices to provide a comprehensive solution. Easy-to-use and deploy, this built-in functionality helps organizations reduce reliance on separate archiving solutions and simplify legal and compliance processes.
Functional Descriptions
Personal Archive: is an additional mailbox associated with a user's primary mailbox. It appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook. In this way, the user has direct access to e-mail within the archive just as they would their primary mailbox. Users can drag and drop PST files into the Personal Archive, for easier online access – and more efficient discovery by the organization. Mail items from the primary archive can also be offloaded to the Personal Archive automatically, using Retention Polices, reducing the size and improving the performance of the primary mailbox. In addition, users can search both their Personal Archive and primary mailbox simultaneously using Outlook.
Retention policies: enable application of retention settings to specific items or folders in a mailbox. Policies are configured by the Exchange Administrator and are displayed inside each e-mail, along with a header stating the applied policy and delete date. These headers make it easier for the end user to identify when an e-mail is set for expiration and apply a new expiration policy if the e-mail needs to be retained for a longer period. Administrators can set also default policy that can move messages from the primary mailbox to the Archive automatically.
Multi-Mailbox Search: enables multi-mailbox searches of mailbox items, including e-mail, attachments, calendar items, tasks and contacts as well as IRM-protected files. Multi-mailbox search works simultaneously across both primary mailboxes and Personal Archives with an easy-to-use control panel. This enables authorized HR, legal, and compliance users to perform searches without reliance on IT. For legal discovery purposes, mail located through search can be copied and moved to a specified mailbox or external store, as defined by the administrator for further investigation. Advanced filtering capabilities include: sender, receiver, expiry policy, message size, sent/receive date, cc/bcc, and regular expressions.
Legal Hold: enables immediate preservation of a user's deleted and edited mailbox items (e-mail, appointments, tasks, etc.) from both their primary mailbox and Personal Archive. Litigation Hold can be set on individual mailboxes or across the enterprise and also includes an option that automatically alerts users that a hold has been placed on their mailbox.
Outlook Web Access
Over the past decade, the need for business communications through the Web has grown as employees have demanded anywhere access to their e-mail. Simultaneously, users are choosing more diverse platforms to access the Internet and are faced with new technologies to keep track of disparate forms of communications (like IM, e-mail, voice mail, RSS, SMS, etc.) all the while, manage greater volumes of overall information.
Exchange Server has always provided cutting edge technologies to help users handle the growing tidal wave of messages they receive. From the introduction of AJAX technology (the foundation of modern Web-based applications), to the integration of multiple modes of communication like voice mail and e-mail, Exchange has helped users stay on top of the growing amounts of communications while consolidating them into a universal inbox that is available from anywhere on the Internet.
Exchange Server 2010 continues the cycle of innovation by allowing users to consolidate their e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, SMS text messages and more; in one location and all from any major Web browser. With Outlook Web Access, users get a rich Outlook experience on the Web that has been created to help users handle the enormous amounts of messages they receive each day by allowing them to view their communications in the context of a conversation; and not just as discrete messages.
The days of workplace communications being just e-mail are long gone. Exchange Server 2010 gives the user the ability to see if others are at their computer, by displaying presence data, so they know if they should e-mail, call, send a quick instant message or send an SMS text message; all from directly within Outlook Web Access. Users can now use the methods to communicate that are most convenient for them, and receive their messages all in one place for easy retrieval, archiving and searching.
Functional Descriptions
Conversation View: By grouping messages from a single conversation together, the new conversation view enable user to quickly identify the most recent messages, and the chain of responses. Conversation view is always preserved, even if individual e-mail message are located in different folders in the mailbox. By treating an entire group of messages as a single conversation it can be managed, ignored, moved, and deleted as a whole. New messages to old conversations will automatically be placed in the folder to which you have directed the conversation, even if you have deleted or ignored a conversation.
Multiple Browser Support: Users can experience the same, great Outlook Web Access Premium experience within Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3+, and Safari 3+. Now, no matter which of the major Web browsers an organization supports, users will have the great Outlook Web Access premium experience they want.
Single Page of Messages: Outlook Web Access 2010 no longer has pages. All messages are on one page and no matter how big the folder, your mailbox will let you scroll through every message without having you advance through pages. Users can more efficiently access the messages and scan conversations to find the communications they are looking for.
Nickname Cache: By storing the e-mail addresses of recent recipients, the Nickname Cache helps users address e-mail more quickly by providing a suggested name list as a new address is typed. This automatically populated list narrows itself as the user types more letters of the recipient's name and is a combined cache of recent recipients of e-mail sent from clients such as Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile.
Filters: Filters are now easier to apply from a convenient dropdown menu with common options.
Search: Searching in Outlook Web Access is now more powerful with advanced queries. Users can use search strings like "from:", "to:", "attachments:" and many others to specify filtering criteria to better find the target messages. Additionally, favorite searches can be saved and accessed at the click of a mouse, providing faster access information.
View Shared Calendar and Contacts: Outlook Web Access in Exchange Server 2010 allows users to view shared calendars and contacts giving them the ability to check schedules and availability of users both inside and outside their organizations.
View/Set Status: A user's contact list is shown in Outlook Web Access with colorful indicators to let the user know if their contact is available to chat or not. This presence indication lets users know which means of communications will help them get the information they need instantly. Users can not only see the status of others but they can also set their own so other users on the network know if they are available to chat.
Instant Messaging (IM): Outlook Web Access now contains instant messaging functionality within the client. Administrators can choose to connect this to Office Communications Server (onsite) or the Windows Live Messenger Service (hosted). Using the status indication of another user, employees can quickly decide if they should send an e-mail or just fire off a quick IM to get a fast response.
SMS Sync: Exchange ActiveSync® now provides the ability to send and receive SMS text messages from Outlook and Outlook Web Access. Incoming messages, sent via EAS to the user's mobile device, will be seen both in the usual SMS message location and the e-mail Inbox.
Administration
Building on the management improvements made with Exchange Server 2007, the management tools in Exchange Server 2010 provide new self-service capabilities to users so they can have more control over their messaging without having to turn to the help desk for answers to common problems or quick fixes. Compliance specialists can perform multi-mailbox searches and export the results to PST files for legal discovery. Users can find out for themselves whether a message they sent to a business partner was received successfully or blocked by a spam filter. The management tools in Exchange 2010 reduce the burden on IT professionals by providing a role-based administration model to allow you to delegate tasks.
Functional Descriptions
Role Based Access Control: The Exchange 2010 Exchange Management Console utilizes remote PowerShell to enable administrators to delegate tasks to responsible users in a controlled way to meet the needs of the organization. Specialized roles for Unified Messaging managers help desk staff, or Exchange server administrators are easy to create, manage and simplify Exchange administration.
Exchange Control Panel: New self-service capabilities are accessible through a Web-based management portal aimed at enabling users to perform common tasks without having to call the help desk. This self–service facility enables users to be more productive and allows IT staff to deliver more, while reducing support costs.
Moderated Distribution Groups: A moderator can be appointed to regulate the flow of messages sent to a distribution group. Anyone can e-mail the distribution group alias, but before the message is delivered to all participants, a moderator must review and approve it. This helps prevent inappropriate or time-wasting e-mail blasts from being delivered to large audiences.
Message Tracking: End-users can track delivery receipt information of all messages sent through a Web-based interface. This helps reduce one of the most common help desk calls.
Storage
Exchange 2010 includes improvements in performance, reliability, and high availability that enable organizations to run Exchange on a wide range of storage options. Building on improvements to disk input/output (IO) that were introduced in Exchange 2007, the latest version of Exchange requires less storage performance and is more tolerant of storage failures.
The improvements made to Exchange Server 2010 storage add new options to the menu of Exchange storage choices, including the use of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) hard disk drives and Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)-less configurations. Whether administrators choose SAN, direct attached, or JBOD storage, Exchange helps them provide larger mailboxes at lower cost without sacrificing system availability.
Functional Descriptions
IO Reductions: Exchange 2010 delivers up to a 50% reduction in disk IO from Exchange 2007 levels. This means that more disks meet the minimum performance required to run Exchange, driving down storage costs.
Optimizations for SATA Disks: IO patterns are optimized so that disk writes do not come in bursts. This removes a barrier that had previously limited the use of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) desktop class hard disk drives disks.
Automatic Page Patching: Exchange Server 2010 is more resilient to storage problems. When corruption is caused by minor disk faults, Exchange automatically repairs the affected database pages using one of the database copies configured for high availability. Automatic detection and repair of data corruptions from minor disk errors means that you can take advantage of lower-cost storage options while maintaining system reliability.
JBOD Support: Exchange 2010 can be deployed with up to 16 replicated copies of each mailbox database, and fast database-level failover makes it possible for administrators to swap failed drives with minimal impact to users. This application-level redundancy allows RAID-less (JBOD) storage configurations to be used, resulting in dramatic cost savings.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery
As the importance of e-mail communications in the workplace continues to grow, IT departments are under increasing pressure to prevent e-mail outages and data loss. To help meet this need, Exchange Server 2010 reduces the cost and complexity of deploying an e-mail solution that provides the highest levels of server availability and site resilience. Building on the native replication capabilities introduced in Exchange Server 2007, the new high availability architecture in Exchange 2010 provides a simplified, unified framework for both high availability and disaster recovery. The result is greater uptime for end users, increased freedom for administrators, and decreased capital and operational costs for the organization.
Functional Descriptions
Database Availability Group: A set of Mailbox servers that uses continuous replication to provide automatic recovery from a variety of failures (disk level, server level, datacenter level).
Database-Level Failover: Exchange Server Database Availability Groups provide automatic failover at the database level, without the complexity of traditional clustering. A database-level disruption, such as a disk failure, no longer affects all the users on a server. Because there is no longer a strong tie between databases and servers, it is easy to move between database copies as disks fail. This change, coupled with faster failover times (30 seconds), dramatically improves an organization's overall uptime.
Improved Site Resiliency: Exchange Server Database Availability Groups makes it easier to implement site resilience by simplifying the process to extend data replication between datacenters to achieve site failover. Log files are also compressed to improve transmission time and reduce network bandwidth usage.
Easier Deployment: Administrators can add high availability to their Exchange environment after their initial deployment, without reinstalling servers. Small organizations can deploy a simple two-server configuration that provides full redundancy of mailbox data along with Client Access and Hub Transport roles. These changes put high availability within the reach of organizations that once considered it impractical.
Integrated Cluster Administration: Exchange Server Database Availability Groups feature automatic failover without the complexity of traditional clustering. The proven capabilities of Windows clustering are integrated with Exchange and are transparent to the administrator. Administrators no longer need to master clustering concepts or deal with separate administration tools in order to provide enterprise-class uptime.
Backup-less Support: The Exchange Server Database Availability Group architecture allows log file replay to be lagged, enabling administrators to perform point-in-time database restores without the need for tapes. Organizations can rely on their high availability infrastructure rather than tape backups to recover from failures, and substantially decrease their operating costs.
Transport Resiliency: Transport servers in Exchange Server 2010 feature built-in protection against the loss of message queues due to disk or server failure. Servers retain a "shadow" copy of each mail item after it is delivered to the next hop inside the organization. If the subsequent hop fails before reporting successful delivery, the message is resubmitted through a different route.
Online Mailbox Moves: Administrators can move mailboxes between databases without taking users offline. Users can connect to their mailboxes, sending and receiving mail, while the move is taking place. This gives administrators the flexibility to perform system maintenance during business hours instead of during the night or weekends.
Information Protection and Control
E-mail has dramatically improved our ability to share information, but it has also increased the risk of accidental distribution and unauthorized access to sensitive communications and information. The problem has become particularly acute in the face of increasing regulations demanding the protection of customer and employee personal information. To better control information that gets distributed through e-mail, Exchange 2010 builds on an already comprehensive list of information protection and control features, with the ability to intercept, moderate, encrypt and block e-mail more effectively. Together, these features provide administrators with a wider range of control options, whether you want to proactively control e-mail with automatic policies or provide users with alerts and tools to help them better manage their own information protection practices.
Functional Descriptions
Transport Protection Rules: when used with Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS), transport protection rules enable an administrator to automatically apply Information Rights Management (IRM) protection to e-mail (including Office and XPS attachments) after a message is sent. This provides persistent protection to the file no matter where it is sent and prevents forwarding, copying, or printing depending on the set of AD RMS Policy Templates available from the AD RMS deployment. Voicemail can also be protected to prevent forwarding to unauthorized persons.
Support for IRM in Outlook Web Access (OWA): enables users to read and create IRM-protected messages natively, just like in Outlook. IRM-protected messages in OWA can be accessed through Windows Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (no plug-in required) and includes full-text search, conversation view, and preview pane.
Outlook Protection Rules: automatically trigger Outlook to apply an RMS template based on sender or recipient identities, before it is sent. Since the messages are protected at the desktop before being sent out to Exchange, this feature allows an organization to block 3rd party service providers or onsite Exchange administrators from viewing sensitive content that is sent between employees.
Transport Decryption: enables access to IRM-protected messages by Transport Agents to perform actions such as content filtering, applying signatures via transport rules, as well as anti-spam and anti-virus scanning. Transport Decryption can also be used with journaling to ensure that journal reports sent to journal mailboxes or 3rd party archiving products will contain a decrypted (clear-text) copy of IRM-protected messages, including and Office and XPS attachments. This allows for indexing and searching of IRM-protected messages for legal discovery and regulatory purposes.
Dynamic Signatures: automatically apply a signature to the bottom of an e-mail based on sender's Active Directory (AD) attributes. This feature can also be configured to apply rich, HTML signatures with specific fonts, company logos, and more.
Expanded Transport Rule Conditions: enable you to moderate, IRM-encrypt, sign, and block e-mail based on more granular conditions such as the actual contents within an Office attachment, a user's Active Directory attributes (e.g. department, country, manager), and multiple message types (such as auto-replies, calendaring, etc.).
MailTips: alert the sender of an e-mail as to certain conditions that may result in policy violations or risk of unintended delivery. For example, MailTips will generate an alert message within an e-mail if: sender is about to reply-all or mail to a large group or external recipient. MailTips is available in both OWA and Outlook 14.
Moderation: re-directs mail to a manager or trusted moderator for review. The reviewer can then approve or block the message and if blocked, provide an explanation back to sender.
Mobile Devices
Mobile e-mail and communication have become a way of life for most businesses and employees. With this, IT administrators have to balance access to their messaging systems with the seemingly contradictory task of protecting that same data from mobile device loss or theft.
In Exchange Server 2010, mobile users can access their messages from a truly universal inbox with Short Message Service (SMS) text messages, e-mail, voice mail, and saved instant message (IM) conversations.
IT administrators can control the devices that connect to their network though a block/allow list. This list ensures that only approved devices are connecting to the messaging data while still offering a wide array of Exchange ActiveSync® enabled devices.
The best part of mobile access in Exchange Server 2010 is that it is all built into Exchange. There is no need to buy extra servers and client access licenses (CALs) from third-party providers or manage another, separate system for mobile access.
Functional Descriptions
Conversation View: the new conversation view quickly and easily enables users to identify the most recent messages and, the series of responses. Conversation view is always preserved, even if individual e-mail messages are located in different folders in the mailbox. By treating multiple messages as a single conversation it can be managed, ignored, moved, and deleted as a whole vs. having to address each e-mail individually. New messages to old conversations will automatically be placed in the folder to which you have directed the conversation, even if you have deleted or ignored a conversation.
Free/Busy Lookup: Exchange ActiveSync now enables users to look at a contact's calendar availability. Right from a user's contact information, a free/busy timeline show users when their contacts are available for a call or meeting.
Nickname Cache: By storing the e-mail addresses of recent recipients, the Nickname Cache helps users address e-mail more quickly by providing a suggested name list as a new address is typed. This automatically populated list narrows itself as the user types more letters of the recipient's name and is a combined cache of recent recipients of e-mail sent from Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile.
SMS Sync: Exchange ActiveSync now provides the ability to send and receive SMS text messages from Outlook and Outlook Web Access. Incoming messages, sent via EAS to the user's mobile device, can be seen both in the usual SMS message location and the e-mail inbox.
Reply State: The icon update helps answer the question, "Did I handle that e-mail yet?" Now you can see if you replied to or forwarded an e-mail just by looking at the icon on the device, even if you replied from Outlook.
Installable client: Upgrading your e-mail functionality no longer requires you to update your phones. All the latest features of Exchange Server are available to any mobile device that has Windows Mobile 6.1 or later. Users of Exchange Server can download an update to Outlook Mobile so that their existing devices can take advantage of all the benefits in the latest version of Exchange ActiveSync.
Voice Mail with Unified Messaging
Communication technology is changing rapidly after years of rest. A quickly growing number of organizations are struggling to provide mobile workforces with more efficient ways of managing voice mail. IT Administrators are increasingly being tasked with providing access to unified messaging in a secure and familiar manner to optimize productivity and decrease management overhead.
To address this demand while reducing cost, Exchange Server 2010 offers unprecedented flexibility over traditional voice mail systems that improve daily productivity by consolidating e-mail and voice mail onto one inbox. Unified Messaging also gives users unique and powerful new ways of accessing their information with a telephone, computer, or mobile device.
Exchange Server 2010 Unified Messaging lets you:
· Triage voice mail immediately upon arrival via the Voice Mail Preview speech-to-text capabilities to act upon voice mail quickly and efficiently without a telephone or computer speaker.
· Manage your voice mail and e-mail systems from a single platform. Enable end users to create customized greetings and individual call transfer options.
· Manage Unified Messaging using scriptable commands to easily create customizable workflows.
· Build highly available and reliable Unified Messaging infrastructures to match an organization's needs.
· Light up the Message Waiting Indicator on your phone to announce the arrival of a new voice mail message.
Functional Descriptions
Voice Mail Preview: Exchange Server 2010 will facilitate the cumbersome task of navigating through voice messages. With Exchange Server 2010 speech-to-text translation, the user can read the contents of the audio recording in the same fashion they would read an e-mail. Furthermore, if the resulting voice messages are opened using Microsoft Office Outlook 2010, the text of the voice mail preview will become "actionable". Recognized names, contacts, and phone numbers will all be identified with icons that the user can select to add contacts, call using Office Communicator, or send e-mail. To facilitate navigation of the audio, clicking in the text will cause the voice mail to jump to that word and continue playing.
Protected Voice Mail: Exchange Server 2010 solves the problem of unauthorized distribution of the messages by securing the message content, specifying the users who may access that content, and the operations that they may perform on it. It uses Active Directory Rights Management Services to apply Do Not Forward permissions to voice messages that are designated either by the sender (by marking the message as private) or by administrative policy. This prevents the forwarding of protected voice mails in a playable form to unauthorized persons, whatever the mail client used.
Message Waiting Indicator (MWI): Now with Unified Messaging, users are notified of the presence of new/unread voice mail by lighting the lamp and providing a count on their supported desk phone. Additionally, users can configure their text messaging notification account to receive the beginning content of the voice mail preview in the SMS.
Auto Attendant: Users are often looking for a person in an organization, but are unsure of the extension or exact phone information. Exchange Unified Messaging's Auto Attendant enables users to easily navigate to the person they are trying to reach when calling an organization with either the telephone keypad or speech inputs to navigate the menu structure, place a call to a user, or locate a user and then place a call to that user. An auto attendant gives you the ability to:
· Create a customizable set of menus for callers
· Define informational greetings, business hours greetings, non-business hours greetings, and holiday schedules
· Describe how to search the organization's directory and connect to a user's extension
· Enable external users to call the operator
Call Answering Rules: Unified Messaging enables users to have more control over their call flows. For a salesman, this could mean the difference between sending an important sales lead to his voice mail instead of finding him on his cell phone or home phone. Call Answering Rules present callers with custom greetings, Find-Me, and call transfer options, in addition to leaving a voice mail. Moreover, these rules can be preceded by conditions (such as caller-IDs, time-of -day and Exchange free/busy status), giving end-users greater control over how they can be reached over the phone.
Outlook Voice Access: Users now have control over their Inbox with Outlook Voice Access via a telephone keypad or voice inputs. This enables anywhere access to their mailbox when a user is away from a computer or Internet-connected device. Now users no longer have need to worry about being late for appointments or being disconnected when traveling, as they can instantly call into their mailbox to manage their calendar, contacts, and e-mail.
Language Support: More users can now listen to and interact with their e-mail and voice mail in their native language or dialect. Exchange Server 2010 offers a broad range of language support with support for 16 languages including three varieties of English, plus Mandarin, Cantonese, European and North American versions of Spanish and French, and several other European languages.
http://microsoft.linkedz.info/2009/04/24/exchange-2010-public-beta/
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