Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 available in Q3 2009

Let me chime in on the Gui versus Powershell thing. I am a former longtime Netware/Groupwise admin, having just migrated from Groupwise 7 to Exchange 2007. Let me tell you a thing about disjointed admin tools. NWAdmin, Console One, text config files, apache and tomcat config files, IManager. Novell had a lovely habit of changing management tools all the time and you had to go to some tools to do certain things, and some tools for others, so I can relate to this. One thing I hate about the EMC/Gui is the fact that you just cannot do (MANY!!) certain changes from the EMC. You have to find the powershell command and run it from there. I am talking about obscure changes you hardly ever have to do (think: anything in set-webservicesvirtualdirectory, certificates, etc). This is kind of frustrating because these simply are NOT areas where powershell would make things EASIER to manage through scripting, they are one-off changes. Another thing is the seeming inconsistency of where to use -ID or -Server when setting or getting paramaters. Also things like checking LCR or SCR replication, there should be a gui way to check replication status rather than having to do a get-storagegroupcopystatus for each server. There should also be a GUI way to fail this over, there is a GLARING lack of documentation and ability to do ANYTHING SCR via the GUI. This really needs to be addressed and I hope you guys did this in at least 2010 exchange, if not, you really missed the boat...

That being said, I really like Exchange 2007 from an administrative perspective. It is very stable, fast. Just some of the admin tasks which you should NOT have to go to the command line to do, you can ONLY do from powershell, which is absolutely rediculous. I could give you 20+ examples. For these, it seems to me this was a situation where the developers were just lazy...