Archive for February, 2007

Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1

Beta of Exchange 2007 SP1 (to be released through TechNet plus this April), and as always we wanted to discuss it publicly here first. We are targeting final release with Longhorn Server 2nd half of this year.

Our work in this service pack is purely in response to your feedback on earlier releases of Exchange 2007. A partial list of what you’ll find included in this SP is:

Standby Continuous Replication (SCR)

With Exchange 2007, we introduced Clustered Continuous Replication (CCR) for replication of data between 2 servers within a cluster within the same datacenter. With SCR, data replicates to a non-clustered server in a remote datacenter. If the primary datacenter becomes unavailable, the standby replica in the second datacenter is readily available to be activated.

Mobility

New policies for:

* Enforcing encryption of main memory contents on device
* Enforcing which applications are allowed/blocked from running on the device
* Enforcing networking capabilities: disable wifi, Bluetooth, infrared, external storage
* Enforcing communication capabilities: disable SMS, MMS, POP/IMAP, disable camera

OWA

SP1 will fill in the feature holes that we just didn’t have time to complete by RTM:

* Personal distribution lists
* S/MIME
* Rules
* Monthly calendar view
* Deleted items recovery

OWA 2007 SP1 spell checking will add support for:

* Arabic
* Korean

OWA 2007 SP1 will add support for viewing Office 2007 file formats as HTML.

Exchange Management Console

SP1 will fill in the GUI holes that we just didn’t have time to complete by RTM, including:

* Public folder configuration
* POP and IMAP configuration
* SendAs permission configuration
* Delegation wizard scenarios

Web Services

New web service coverage will include:

* Public folder access
* Delegate management
* Folder permission management

IPv6

On Longhorn Server, we will support Exchange 2007 on native IPv6 networks.

Move Mailbox

This vital tool administrator tool has been beefed up to include import and export to a .pst

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Windows Vista Express Upgrades could begin shipping next week

Chicago (IL) - If you purchased a PC before January 30 and took advantage of the Vista Express Upgrade program, you know by now that this program is everything else but “Express”. In fact, three of the five largest PC vendors in the U.S. have confirmed to TG Daily that - almost four weeks after the launch of the OS - no Vista Express Upgrades have shipped to their customers yet.

The Vista Express upgrade program appears to be causing headaches in all links that are involved in the supply chain - Microsoft’s chosen upgrade provider ModusLink, PC vendors and consumers. Ken Walker, as senior director responsible for the Vista rollout at Gateway, told TG daily in a conversation today that “probably no Vista Express Upgrades have been delivered to PC buyers yet.” This assumption was confirmed to TG Daily by two other large U.S. PC vendors.

The Vista Express Upgrade program was put in place by Microsoft to make the new operating system part of the Christmas buying season, while the actual software was not released until January 30 of this year. Most new PCs purchased during the holiday season qualified for this “Express Upgrade,” which promised consumers - depending on the PC manufacturer - a convenient and free (or fairly cheap) upgrade to the new operating system.

10,000 Participants Join Windows Home Server Beta 2

At the beginning of this week, Joel Sider, Sr. Product Manager, Windows Server PR, said that the Windows Home Server team was sending out invitations to the limited beta 2 program by the truckload. Well, he wasn’t far from the truth. As of this week, the number of requests for participations on the second beta to the Windows Home Server has jumped in excess of 25,000. This amount of response is immense when you take into consideration the fact that, at the beginning of January 2007, this product was a Microsoft inhouse secret.

“Last Friday, we invited the first 10,000 people who filled out the survey to join the Windows Home Server Beta 2 program. Here are a few stats: 9,835 people entered a valid e-mail address, 6,693 have activated their Connect Invitation ID, 5,686 have acquired a product key from the Connect site for installing the software,” revealed Todd Headrick, the product planner for the Microsoft Windows Home Server.

And this is not enough. The Windows Home Server team will continue to welcome participants to the beta 2 program. At this point in time, none of the members of the WHS team has indicated what the limit will be. “We hope to be sending out another bunch of invitations soon … thanks for your patience,” Headrick added.

There is also a public web forum where users will be able to access additional information related to Windows Home Server: http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer and http://www.serverplayground.com.

System Center Essentials RC1 Available

The System Essentials team is very pleased to announce the availability of the Release Candidate 1 software on the Microsoft Connect website.We encourage you to promptly download and start testing this exciting release of SCE! What’s new in Essentials RC1?

Capabilities:

* Support for upgrading from WSUS 2.0 and 3.0
* Emailed Daily Health Report
* Automatic scheduled discovery of computers from Active Directory
* Enhanced network monitoring of SNMP-enabled network devices including a network topology diagram view
* Remote Control support for remote control of managed client and server computers
* Ability to import Update catalogs from third-party software publishers
* SQL Services based reporting on monitoring, hardware and software inventory
* Setup experience improvements for SQL Server selection and file locations
* More management packs including support for Exchange 2003, Dynamics CRM 3.0, and Active Directory

Enhanced Platform support

* non-English US locales
* installing Essentials on x64 servers
* managing Windows Vista
* managing x64 systems
* Support for managing systems in multiple domains in a single forest

System Center Essentials RC1 at Connect

Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Preview 2008 available

If you’ve been wanting to try out Windows Media Player 11, Internet Explorer 7, .NET 3.0 Framework, Remote Desktop Protocol 6.0, or User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) on Windows XP Embedded, here is your chance!

In addition to the new features included in Feature Preview 2008 there have also been some bug fixes and functional enhancements made to File Based Write Filter ( additional disk size reporting option) and to USB Boot (Improved power management).

Windows XP Embedded SP2 “Feature Preview 2008″ is now available for download at Connect

Windows Desktop Search 3.01

Windows Desktop Search (WDS) 3.01 is a minor update to Windows Desktop Search 3.0 that adds: support for indexing UNC files, additional support for enterprise deployment, and stability improvements. WDS 3.01 installs on Windows XP and Window Server 2003, but is not needed for Windows Vista since the WDS component is already included in Vista. Windows Desktop Search 3.01 helps you to find, preview, and use your documents, e-mail, music, photos, and other items. The search engine in Windows Desktop Search 3.01 is a Windows service that is also used by applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007 to index application content and deliver instant results when searching within that application.

If you choose to install and use Windows Desktop Search, you can search for e-mail, documents and other files located on your computer. No information about the files on your computer will be sent to Microsoft as part of this process. Instead, Windows Desktop Search will index the content of your computer and store the index file on your computer. You can customize Windows Desktop Search to index only specified folders on your computer. Windows Desktop search will not store copies of e-mail or documents after they are deleted.

Note WDS 3.01 can be installed as a new install or as an upgrade from 02.05.xxxx, 02.06.xxxx or 03.00.0000. On an upgrade from 03.00.0000, you will not need to rebuild your index.

This download package includes the Update.exe, ADM File and Add-in for Files on Microsoft Networks.

After you install these items, you may have to restart your computer.

Also available:

* Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows XP x64 Edition (KB917013)
* Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows Server 2003 (KB917013)
* Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB917013)
* Multilingual User Interface Pack for Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows XP (KB917013)

News source: Microsoft

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