Have broad Exchange questions? What are they?

I would like a cmdlet to document the entire org to an XML file.  Then use the same cmdlet to get "what changed".  I think your PSS team would love it too.  The final stage would be if there was an EMC tool that could point to it and view just the changes.  Very much like how the Security Analyzer works with inf templates.

How long does Exchange 2007 SP1 take to install?  We have tried it in our test lab on a crappy server and it took about 1.5 hours to upgrade an Exchange 2007 install to SP1.  This only had about a 2 gb mailbox database.  Our production server is a fast server with plenty of memory running Exchange 2007, but has about 500gb of database replicated.  
Will it take longer than the install in test or doesn't the database size matter?

1. What functionality will be added to the E12 GUI and when?
2. Entourage and Exchange. The good folks at the MacBU speak often of "There's more in Entourage 2008! Really, way more than 2004!" This is true, but I believe I speak for everyone with this: if (Outlook == Entourage) { happyUsers++; }
3. Exchange and OCS. Merging one day?
4. WHAT'S NEXT? Next SP? When? E14? When?

I think the Exchange model for handling Messages/Attachments/Single Instance Storage (SIS) has reached its limits.

I think Messages should be stored in one place -- and Attachments stored someplace else other than the Mailbox Stores.  (Attachments should be stored in a database or a file-system share or a Sharepoint library, if that scales sufficiently.)

In this way, the moment a message is received from an outside party, or a message is generated internally, the attachment would stored in a SIS within the organization.    Ideally you would like to see MIME still work as-expected, so that when the message is sent from internal to external, the attachment goes along for the ride.

Our company uses a third-party archiving package -- but it really would be unneccessary if Exchange handled Single-Instance-Storage of attachments, efficiently from the moment the mail is generated.

When can we expect all possible exchange functionality to be exposed in the GUI?  If not in 2007, then this should be a priority for the next release.  Also, we want ADUC Exchange functionality restored or at least to option to use it...can't understand why this was removed in the first place.  I don't want my helpdesk to have to mess around in EMC or run scripts to do things like move mailboxes.

Why do MCS guys tell us to switch to DAS?  (which is considerable more difficult to manage and control) versus our SAN which is performing well -we have a pretty good team to handle my storage needs and we're doing hardware-assisted VSS snapshots unlike what they tell us we should switch to - network/CPU intensive DPM.  

Seems like a strategy to sell more licenses to me.

Edward P

Why hasn't MS acknowledged and put out guidence for the rpc over http bug when running e12sp1 on server 2008. http://blog.aaronmarks.com/?p=65 There are a lot of us who have spent way too much time chasing our tails on this one and MS support was no help either.

I know this may seem like more of a "clients" question, but I'm wondering when the gap between Outlook and Entourage will be decreased?  

There are so many Exchange features that are lacking in Entourage that it has caused many problems for me lately.  Every single client of mine has at least a couple Macs now and it is frequently someone in upper-level management that buys a Mac and then wants me to set it up and give them access to all of the features that they had access to on their PC via Outlook.  When can we expect...

1.  Categories?
2.  Access to Tasks?
3.  Ability to change permissions?
4.  Recovery of deleted items?
5.  Access to the LDAP while mobile (would require it not doing GAL lookups on the LDAP port0?
6.  Maybe even true RPC over HTTP MAPI support?
7.  etc.

This is an Exchange question becuase there is a huge portion of users who are being cheated out of using a ton of great Exchange features that are available today and to come in future versions.

I heard OCS 2007 is not currently supported in Windows 2008. When is it going to be compatible?

If we propose a Windows 2008 based AD & Exchange 2007 with OCS 2007, it would seem challenging because of this compatibility issues..

I want to know if they have a planed release date for the domain rename process to update it to exchange 2007. This was an advertised feature of Windows 2003, and to have them break it with a new product without a way to do this is shortsighted. Changing the domain back is not a fix, it is an admission that the process is broken.