Have broad Exchange questions? What are they?
Published Mar 31 2008 12:45 PM 1,550 Views

In his keynote at INTERACT2008, Terry Myerson will be addressing some of the top questions and issues that we hear from customers around Exchange Server 2007.  If you could ask Terry anything, what would it be?  Please post your questions here by Friday, April 4th.

- The Exchange Team

23 Comments
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I'd like to get a better sense that the Exchange folks and the SharePoint folks have been talking to each other. The email integration in MOSS 2007 is sorely lacking .. very much so.

I would not push for reversing the decision to phase out Exchange public folders .. I actually think they have outlived their usefulness. But for companies that have dependencies on their functionality, can we expect SharePoint to be able to pick this up with more solid integration in the future? And not just the ability to send email to a document library, or a migration tool, but allowing posts/emails to be directed to SharePoint in a scaleable way, and be accessible in a user-friendly way. Think "public folder web part".
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1. Will we see a version of Exchange soon which may ease the pains those of us with centralized Exchcnge server hardware yet highly decentralized Exchange admin situations deal with on a regular basis? Perhaps a version that is much more role based for a quasi-hosting facility type deployment. For example think about governments hosting Exchange centrally for their many smaller agencies, but each agency is responsible for user/mailbox administration.

2. Will auditing ever become part of Exchange? Can we at least get  of "Last Accessed By" split out so we can identify if a user accessed a calendar free/busy information or someone's Inbox?

3. Will archiving to secondary storage (or other means) ever become part of the product?

4. Please give us the option to merge or split the Exchange & AD tools. Not all of customers have seperate AD & Exchnage teams.

Thank you.
Not applicable
Need the option to connect Exchange Organisations between Forests, with features like one unified GAL for the users visible in Outlook, features like "universal groups" across forest boundaries ...
Not applicable
Need to integrate better with existing Microsoft products, like ISA and Outlook, especially the requirement to use certificates or SSL connections to internal clients (There wasn't a requirement to have SSL or certificates with Exchange 2003).
Not applicable
A Where-used function.
For example, who has access/permissions to this Mailbox ?
Not applicable
I have question based on a customer requirment I am working - Before I ask question, here is the scenario:

Scenario:
Customer has two physical location (one single AD site) where we balanced 50-50 users in a HOT-HOT case. Meaning, both physical sites. Lets call it Site A & Site B.

Both Sites have identical architecture which can load balance as well as disaster recovery site. Both sites have Edge Servers, Hub Transport Servers & Mailbox servers.

Our current problem in the design:
When outside user sends email to a user in Site A, it may hit the edge at Site A and route to the Hub Transport in Site B and traverse back to Hub in Site A again after recipient resolution, then deliver to the mailbox in Site A.

We want the following to happen in our desin:

When outside user sends email to a user in Site A, it may hit the edge at Site A or Site B and route to the Hub Transport in Site A only. Then after recipient resolution in Site A Hub Server, deliver to the mailbox in Site A.

How to make this happen?

-Firozsha
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Why, oh why, oh why is audit success/failure events written for Exchange into a servers  application event log?

It is very difficult to automate and report upon diagnostic "account" information (access to mailboxes) out of Exchange unless you buy a 3rd party product.

Better integration between OpsMgr (ACS) and Exchange to retreive the audit information in the application event logs? Again, ACS only checks the security event log which isn't where Exchange writes it's security events! Grrrr.

Unless I'm wrong,
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When will the deficiencies in OWA Light 2007 be addressed. Even with Exchange 2007 SP1 installed, OWA Light does not offer Deleted Item Recovery or Public Folder access. (These features were also missing from OWA Premium in the RTM version.) Furthermore,

opening someone else's shared Calendar on a non-IE browser via the URL

https://CAS_FQDN/owa/TARGET_SMTP_ADDRESS/?cmd=contents&f=calendar results in the error "Access to Calendar folders from Outlook Web Access Web Parts is supported only for Internet Explorer 6 and later."



In our academic environment, these shortcomings are major pain points for our Mac users, especially the lack of access to Deleted Item Recovery, which is also a problem with Entourage.

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Seconding the previous post about OWA Light.  Maybe Light can stay "light", but there is a definite need for premium type feature parity beyond IE 6+7.  Perhaps this will get pushed by the fact that IE 8 in standards mode trashes OWA completely... but if OWA premium was truly a standard AJAX application it wouldn't have any problems working cross-browsers.  It doesn't even work on Pocket IE.  .NET has been able to do this for years now cross-browser, why not owa?
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1) I would also like to know when we can expect a proper cross-browser/OS experience. Firefox and Safari have plenty of market share as does OS X and Linux, epsecially in an academic environment such as ours. OWA light is just not good enough.

2) When will there be a serious migration tools for 2007, that perform fast for large numbers of large mailboxes, support things like IMAP PROXYAUTH and can import mbox formats. It would also be good to have outlook profile, calendar, contacts and other migration tools.

3) When will there be a proper Exchange client for Mac OS X, not Entourage. 2008 still isnt "Outlook", people desperately want feature parity and this has been going on for years and years. I know this is more "Office" than "Exchange" but it's all Microsoft!
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A complete GUI would be nice...
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For those of us who will still be on Exchange 2003 for quite some time to come, what can we expect at this point? Is development dead? Will there ever be an SP3 or at least a post-SP2 update rollup to speed up installations? Thanks.
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A tool to do a smoother migration from Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows 2003 to Exchange 2007 SP1 running on Windows 2008. An inplace upgrade would be very nice, now you have to uninstall exchange and completely rebuilt the server if you don't have any spare hardware. And if you have spare hardware you still need to do some manual work in to get het move to windows 2008 working.
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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.
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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..
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
Not applicable
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.

Not applicable
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?
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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?
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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.
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