It certainly has been an exciting couple of months with the UC Launch and hearing a lot of great feedback and excitement from customers and press about the work we've done in Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Today we are announcing the release of SP1 to the web for existing Exchange Server 2007 customers and the update of our trial package for customers looking at deploying Exchange Server 2007 for the first time. I would like to thank our Technical Adoption Program (TAP) customers who have really shaped this release through their early deployments of Exchange Server 2007. It was their feedback and participation in the SP 1 TAP that has driven most of the features in this release. In a meeting with our TAP customers earlier in the week we asked them if SP1 was ready to ship; I would like to share with you a few of comments from that meeting:
"With the additional enhancements contained in SP1, Exchange Server 2007 is a "must have" for all organizations, large or small. The enhancements (and there are many) we are most excited about revolve around an improved Site Resiliency Solution with the inclusion of Standby Continuous Replication and the continuous improvements to Outlook Web Access." - Gary Cooper, Horizons Consulting
"I've been really excited about some of the UI enhancements (especially bulk mailbox creation), but for my customers the OWA features have taken the cake! The return of Public Folder access, a monthly calendar view, and the ability to work with Personal DL's produced cheers from the troops. The ability to recover deleted items as well as a great deal of added right-click functionality was also a big plus - we can now offer our staff and students truly robust access to their Exchange resources... anytime, anywhere!" - Sarah Windsor, Tracy Unified School District
"Exchange Server 2007 was a significant step forward for Exchange, raising the bar for performance, stability and scalability and allowing HP to consolidate our 260,000+ mailboxes from over 100 locations to 3 and reduce the number of Exchange servers by two thirds. Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 rounds out the enterprise features of Exchange Server 2007 with even better management, improved support for our Windows Mobile devices and takes disaster recovery and fault tolerance to a new level." - Stan Foster, HP Technology Solutions Group
"Kudos to the Exchange team for this landmark release, which has more new features and functionality than any other service pack ever. The Exchange ActiveSync experience has been wonderful, and so has OWA. Most of all, the High Availability improvements and addition of SCR make SP1 a hard-to-resist release. Participating in E12 and E12 SP1 TAP programs was a great opportunity to work with a very customer-focused product team - you guys rock! This is also one of the best documented releases of Exchange Server, and given the mind-boggling amount of information covered in the documentation, that's no small feat. Congratulations to the UE team for that!" - Bharat Suneja (Exchange MVP), ZenpriseFor those of you who have deployed Exchange Server 2007 and are ready to apply SP1 you can go out and download the bits here. Please read the Release Notes located here. If you are ready to try out Exchange Server 2007 SP1 you can download the trial here. As this service pack is slipstreamed you can install Exchange Server 2007 SP1 without installing Exchange Server 2007; so there is no need to download the Exchange Server 2007 trial first. - The Exchange team
