Exchange 12 Stuff that I liked
I got a sneak preview of the Exchange 12 at TechReady and got excited about a few things. Since most of the features are included in beta’s I can share them with you.
1) New server roles. Gone is the idea of a “Front End Server”, instead there will be several roles that a server can have. This eliminates the need to install Exchange completely on each FE then disable services that aren’t used. It is much more streamlined and only bits needed are loaded on the server.
2) Lots of great new features on the backend as far as storage groups and mailstore options. I won’t elaborate a whole lot more, but you can read all about it soon. There is an up to 75 percent reduction in I/O per second, which is remarkable.
3) Voice, voice, voice. I did a project 3 years ago with a startup company, and we called it HUC (Hosted Unified Communications). It was all about PBX integration and Call Control. When a call comes into your PBX, it tries to ring your phone and then runs a set of rules that we had on a proprietary server that determined whether to call your cell phone, etc. Eventually, the call ends up in Voice Mail, and the PBX system used SMTP/IMAP to push and pull Email messages. This is a lot like what Vonage or ATT Callvantage do today for consumers, but this was for business.
The hardest part was the blinking (I use this as an expletive as well as a visual indicator) red new message light on your phone. The problem was always that if you picked up your Vmail via email, how would the phone know that it is okay to turn off the blinking red message light?
The idea is to have a common message repository for Vmail and Email. This was a HUGE pain 3 years ago, but oh what a difference 3 years makes! I saw this in action, so it isn’t complete vaporware, and we actually had it do things to our mailboxes and mobile phones (unrehearsed).
Basically, Exchange becomes the store for everything. Voice mail can be picked up via Outlook, where it becomes more than an attached WAV file. Outlook has a built in player, and you can check in either via the fat Outlook client or OWA. But wait, it gets better! Say you are at an airport Kiosk which doesn’t have speakers or you don’t want people around you to hear your personal message. You can have the Exchange server call your cell phone and play it for you.
Along those same lines, the “voice” of Exchange becomes very, very powerful. You can have Exchange do simple things like read email back to you, but much more. You can schedule appointments, and dig deeper by having Exchange search free/busy schedules of attendees. You can also do amazing things with contacts such as searching them and have Exchange connect them to your mobile phone.
Given, we probably used the best partner we had for PBX integration, and there is a lot of plumbing work behind the scenes. To do all this stuff, still involves SIP gateways, and most importantly High Availibilty (afterall, how many times does your Vmail system go down?) But, the voice stuff absolutely blew me away.
4) I also liked the Exchange Management Shell, which basically lets you script ANYTHING that you can do in GUI. This is where the magic for consultants like me will happen.
5) SSL Integration and opportunistic TLS is finally there, and integrated nicely.
6) OWA ships with web parts, which allows much more flexibility for developers when they are developing portal with .NET 2.0 or SharePoint. You can basically move around anything on the screen for users.
7) Resource scheduling (conference rooms, etc) is finally better than GroupWise, which I still think has one of the best user experiences for finding available resources.
Anyway, I knew I was going to like MOSS 2007 (SharePoint) and I am using Office 2007 on my main laptop now, I just wasn’t prepared for the really cool stuff in Exchange 12. Looks like 2007 is going to be a great year to be an infrastructure consultant. For more info on what is new, check out the Exchange 2007 Preview Web Site