New features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Ross Mistry and Shirmattie Seenarine, Contributors - 07.02.2009
Mark your calendars for the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products, scheduled to ship later this year. Solutions providers who pay close attention to the various new features of Exchange Server 2010 will be ready to design and deploy when the product ships. You'll want to be fully informed about the new service offerings you can provide that will drive Exchange server implementations. They include:
- Client access connectivity
- High availability and disaster recovery
- New scalability and performance enhancements
- Protection and compliance
- Integration with Microsoft Office 2010
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Client access connectivity in Exchange Server 2010
The latest version introduces a new remote procedure call (RPC), Client Access Service. Client data is now rendered through the midtier client access server (CAS) infrastructure instead of connecting directly to the mailbox server. Client data connectivity includes Outlook Client, Outlook Web Access (OWA), Entourage, Mailbox Agents, ActiveSync and Unified Messaging. This change is intended to offload contention from the mailbox servers and to support the new Exchange 2010 high-availability architecture, which allows independent failover at the database level by introducing database availability groups (DAGs). Service providers should know that an Exchange 2010 CAS server is required in every Active Directory site where an Exchange 2010 MBX server is deployed. In addition, OWA offers support for browsers such as Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.
High availability and disaster recovery in Exchange Server 2010
The new DAG in Exchange 2010 builds on the native replication capabilities introduced in Exchange Server 2007. It has a simplified, unified framework for high availability and disaster recovery, resulting in greater uptime for end users, increased freedom for administrators and decreased capital and operational costs for organizations, according to Microsoft.
Traditional Single Copy Clusters (SCC) and Local Continuous Replication (LCR) have been deprecated and therefore are no longer required. The enhanced technology provides database protection and automatic recovery by replicating Exchange data to any mailbox server within the DAG. Each mailbox can have up to 16 copies, and the log-shipping technologies support encryption and compression out of the box.
New scalability and performance enhancements
Service providers should know that the enhancement of the store schema and database cache in Exchange 2010, compared with Exchange 2007, reduces I/O by an additional 70% and 90%, respectively. In addition, a single mailbox can easily support 100,000 messages per folder. Exchange 2010 in conjunction with Outlook 2010 also supports mailboxes larger than 2 GB, which, as service providers know, is considered to be a very large mailbox. Exchange Server 2010 running on the enterprise edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 supports up to 256 logical processors and 2 terabytes (TBs) of RAM.
Protection and compliance
In response to regulatory requirements, organizations are demanding that manufacturers improve the levels of protection and compliance within their software. Because this issue is not only a central one for customers, service providers should be aware of the new features in Exchange Server 2010 that address compliance, archiving and retention needs. Exchange Server 2010 includes out-of-the-box technology to archive mailboxes and conduct e-discovery searches for specific email messages. Exchange Server 2010 also includes tools to migrate Personal Storage Table (.PST) files back into Exchange to better manage compliance and legal discovery. Finally, Exchange can be combined with Active Directory Rights Management Services to protect email content and expand on protection and control.
Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010
Exchange Server 2010 is associated with the next wave of Microsoft Office products that include Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. By combining these technologies, you can reduce costs, increase productivity and improve the way your customers collaborate within the enterprise. Exchange Server 2010 is scheduled for release in the second half of 2009. Other Office-related products, such as Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010, are scheduled for release in the first half of 2010.
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