Great article

but I’m not sure I agree. From my point of view the article reveals nothing that isn’t known for months. Exchange 2010 is RTM for half a year already. What I really would like to see (and so are others) is a detailed comparison between both Enterprise Vault and Exchange Server. So far I’ve not been able to find such a comparison anywhere on the public internet, so let me have a shot at it myself:

Note: This info is preliminary. Both products are in need for E2K10 SP1 before they can be taken seriously. Enterprise Vault 9 is still in beta at the moment and will only support E2010 from SP1 onwards. Exchange Server 2010 will allow separating primary and secondary mailboxes starting with SP1. This highly anticipated Service Pack will probably be released somewhere around Q3 of this year.

Apart from that I’m convinced we’re actually seeing the trusted Microsoft strategy of entering the market with a basic feature set. They feel the temperature and then gain market share gradually. Release after release.

Whether you agree or not, or just want to contribute to the discussion; feel free to comment.

The number of subfilters exceeds maximum allowed number of 100. Processing stopped.

Apparently an e-mail address policy cannot contain more than 100 address templates. Read on for more details: Watch those recipient Policies!!!

Note: an individual recipient cannot have more than 100 e-mail addresses either.

The contents at a glance:

Planning the Exchange Server 2010 Infrastructure
* Design the Exchange Server 2010 installation.
* Design message routing.
* Design the mailbox server role.
* Design client access.
* Plan for transition and coexistence.

Deploying the Exchange Server 2010 Infrastructure
* Prepare the infrastructure for Exchange Server 2010 deployment.
* Deploy Edge transport server role.
* Deploy client access server role.
* Deploy hub transport server role.
* Deploy mailbox server role.
* Deploy server roles for coexistence and migration.

Designing and Deploying Security for the Exchange Organization
* Design and deploy messaging security.
* Design and deploy Exchange permissions model.
* Design and deploy message hygiene.
* Design and deploy client access security.
* Design and deploy Exchange object permissions.

Designing and Deploying Exchange Server 2010 Availability and Recovery
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for Exchange dependencies.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for CAS role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for mailbox server role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for hub transport role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for Edge transport server role.

Designing and Deploying Messaging Compliance, System Monitoring, and Reporting
* Design and deploy auditing and discovery.
* Design and deploy message archival.
* Design and deploy transport rules for message compliance.
* Design and deploy for monitoring and reporting.

The first exam Exam 70-662: TS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Configuring is already available for a month or 2. For some reason it seems to have slipped through my RSS feeds without me noticing it. Guess I’ll need to add another one.

Time to start preparing.

One of the first warmly welcomed new features included with the next release of Microsoft Office Outlook, being 2010, is the ability to open up multiple mailboxes (up to 3 by default, and up to 15 using a registry entry) and the fact that when you send a message using one of the accounts the mail will be saved in the Sent Items folder of the sender’s mailbox. When opening a shared mailbox in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, it required you to create at least a rule to have the message moved from the primary mailbox its Sent Items folder, to the shared mailbox its Sent Items…

But…it seems that ever since June 2009, 30, this isn’t necessary anymore!

Read on…

The recently released Microsoft Exchange 2010 Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version, like its predecessors, includes a wealth of new features and improvements over existing ones. As a matter of fact, with this release, Exchange now consists of approximately 21 million lines of code.

Exchange developers had five main goals in mind for Exchange 2010: to help organizations achieve new levels of reliability, better performance, simplified administration, improved protection of communications and greater business mobility for users. In short, and with the global economic crisis in mind, they aimed to create a more flexible and optimized product that would lower the costs of running an Exchange 2010 infrastructure.

Since April 2008, I have spent a good deal of time testing Exchange 2010 beta and release candidate builds in my labs, as well as in two enterprise customer environments. In this article, I will take you on a tour through the most exciting changes and improvements in this latest and—without doubt—greatest Exchange version we have seen so far.

Read on.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate is now available.

As a participant in the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta experience, we invite you to download the new Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate version. Now you can evaluate the release candidate product to simplify your IT environment and give you more control.

Resources delivered right when you need them.

You will have access to resources that will help you optimize your evaluation of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 RC. Get started now to take advantage of the wealth of resources. Download Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 RC today.

Sincerely,
Your TechNet Team

More details on E2K10 can be found on the Evaluation Center.

You can either read the details on the Exchange 2010 product home page or checkout this assessment (less Marketing!) from Ferris Research. Screenshot junkies on the other hand can check out this blog post from The Three UC Amigos. Last but not least there’s a TechNet webcast coming up (10th of June) which covers the new “Archiving & Retention” features.

Update 2009-06-26: Noticed an interesting discussion in the TechNet forums covering the “Personal Archive” feature.

• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 High Availability (Level 300) Monday, June 1, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Overview (Level 200) Wednesday, June 3, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Forefront code name “Stirling” – The next generation of Forefront Security for Exchange Server (Level 200) Thursday, June 4, 2009 1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Management Tools (Level 300) Monday, June 8, 2009 1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering is now Forefront Online Security for Exchange (Level 200) Tuesday, June 9, 2009 1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Archiving and Retention (Level 300) Wednesday, June 10, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Outlook Web Access (Level 200) Monday, June 15, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Architecture (Level 300) Wednesday, June 17, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Federation in Exchange 2010 (Level 300) Monday, June 22, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Voice Mail enabled by Unified Messaging (Level 300) Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Information Protection and Control (Level 300) Monday, June 29, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
• TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Transition and Deployment (Level 300) Wednesday, July 1, 2009 9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time

At a certain moment I couldn’t install because of an incomplete uninstall. Uninstalling exchange was also unsuccessful because some objects were missing from Active Directory. When I finally got out of that loop, I started getting complaints about MSI’s that could not be found/unpacked. I wanted to avoid reinstalling the OS so I tried removing exchange manually.

1. Run setup /m:uninstall
2. Stop and disable all the Exchange 2007 services
3. Use Registry Editor (Start->Run->Regedit) to remove these Exchange related registry keys:
   • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange
   • HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchange* (all the keys starting with “MSExchange”)
   • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Exchange
4. Remove the entire Web Server role (don’t forget to reinstall afterwards as it’s a prerequisite for E2K7!)
5. Remove the Exchange 2007 server from Active Directory. I ended up deleting the entire “Microsoft Exchange” branch from ADSIEdit (Configuration Container > Services > Microsoft Exchange) as my Org only counts one server.
6. Use Windows Explorer to delete:
   • C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server
   • C:\ExchangeSetupLogs
7. Use Windows Installer CleanUp Utility to remove all the exchange related info from the installer database.
8. Remove the security groups created by Exchange setup from AD

Note: Manually removing Exchange 2007 is not supported by Microsoft! Official guidance for removing Exchange 2007 can be found in this TechNet article.