Alfa BBT

It seems that Microsoft published the second Exchange 2010 exam today: Exam 70-663: Pro: Designing and Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

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.

I wanted to quickly reblog (as opposed to retweet) a recent blog post from Ilse Van Criekinge as I did have a little “Aha!”-moment upon reading it:

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…

A colleague noticed my impressive list of exchange related blogs/sites in Google Reader and asked me to share them with him on occasion. Luckily you can export all feeds from a specific folder via some workaround.

Exchange RSS Feeds

You can get the resulting file by downloading it from RapidShare (I’ve activated TrafficShare for this file, so no nag-screen there). You can then import all of these feeds to the RSS-reader of your choice in just one shot.

The hard part is keeping up ;-)

Note: If you are more into mailinglists than you should have a look at this blogpost from Joeware. (ref. ADFind)

Those of you that are eagerly looking for some bed time reading material (and aren’t satisfied with the “Exchange News Ticker”-widget in the lower right corner of this blog) can check out the Exchange 2010 KB-article news feed as explained by Paul Robichaux.

See RSS feed for Exchange 2010 KB articles – Paul’s Down-Home Page: Exchange, security, and more.

Henrik Walther wrote a nice article on Exchange 2010 for the December edition of TechNet Magazine:

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.

Pro-Exchange: Exchange 2007 Notes from the Field

I’ve always wanted to attend an event organized by the Belgian Exchange Community. With 2 very small children there’s always something that seems to pop up last minute however.

Well not this time. The invitation mentioned “lessons learned” and “Exchange 2007 implementations” in one sentence, which sounded like a good combination to me.

Indeed, in a presentation that lasted about 2 hours Tonino covered his personal experiences with Exchange implementations. Both general recommendations concerning the management of an implementation project and technical solutions were discussed. The level of the presentation was just about right. No too technical (don’t want to discus reg keys for 2 hours) but not too much sales pitch either.

I had an interesting evening and will certainly attend some more events in the future!

Note: I’ll add links to the presentation and the Chopsticks video when they become available online.

This morning in my mailbox:

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.

Got some questions from one of our customers about Exchange 2010 archiving. First of all its important to understand that the solution proposed by Microsoft is like having a second mailbox in the same database. I’m sure the technology will evolve later on but this seems kind of a drawback to me.

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.

Hundreds of blogs already reported on the release of the beta of Exchange 2010/Exchange 14.

 Anyway, here are some resources in case you would want to catch up with the latest messaging bits from Microsoft:

• Product Home Page
• Download Beta Version
• Technet Documentation Library
• TechNet Forum

The most important changes:

1. SCR, LCR & SCC all dissapear. CCR will be enhanced with multiple replicas of the same database
2. Web based management console (on top of PowerShell)
3. OWA becomes “Outlook Live”
   1. Self-service features for the end user: e.g. request membership of a DL
   2. Premium interface finally supports Firefox (and Safari)
   3. Gmail like conversation view.
4. Role Based Access Control for an even more granular delegation model
5. Storage groups are replaced by Availability Groups.
6. All mailbox access passes through the CAS servers,  adding an extra abstraction layer.

A more extensive write-up of the new E2K10 can be found on simple-talk.com. Some installation guidance can be found on Scott Schnoll’s Blog on the other hand.

Note that the only supported Operating System so far is Windows Server 2008 x64 (no R2!)

Happy testing!