What's New in Exchange 2007?

Built-in protection, anywhere access, and operational efficency are the three themes of Exchange 2007.

In a recent web seminar, we highlighted the new capabilities in the latest version of Microsoft Exchange. The capabilities can be summarized into three categories or themes.

Three Themes of Exchange 2007

Built-in Protection – The capabilities in this area are focused on high availability and protection from disasters without the added cost, as well as improved technologies to safeguard users and your organization’s data from internal and external threats such as spam, viruses, and e-mail tampering. In addition, Exchange 2007 provides built-in functionality to help simplify compliance with internal and regulatory controls. New features include:

• Integrated anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing capabilities
• Encryption of email messages using opportunistic TLS
• Out-of-the-box high availability, disaster recovery and clustering capabilities
• Continuous replication (reduced nightly backup requirements)
• Server “roles” are parsed out for better security (Edge Server now separate; Hub Transport and Mailbox can remain on the same server)
• New compliance capabilities
• Advanced policies for retention and expiration using folder rules
• Transport rules inspect and act on messages in transit
• Advanced searching across all mailboxes for e-discovery

Anywhere Access – These new enhancements center around user productivity by centralizing communications, providing a common interface users know, and making email and calendar information accessible anywhere, anytime. Plus collaboration is even easier because of remote scheduling and document sharing. New features include:

• Unified Messaging – single inbox for email, voicemail, faxes and calendaring
• Voice activated functions such as email read to you
• Complete capabilities via Outlook Web Access (OWA) and better ActiveSync capabilities
• New scheduling assistant that finds people and resources more effectively
• Access and share documents behind the company firewall with a secure VPN

Operational Efficiency – These new improvements will help your company get more out of your hardware and networking investments, making deployment easier and more flexible. New features include:

• Management console is redesigned to make it more functional and easier to administer
• 64-bit system for better performance (yes, this version requires a 64-bit system)
• Records management policies for better control of how, where mail is organized and how it is retained
• Exchange Management Shell commands to perform key administrative tasks faster

Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 – Better Together

These are just some of the key new features in Exchange 2007 that can help your organization be more productive. There is also a new version of Outlook 2007 which takes advantage of many of the new capabilities in Exchange 2007. You can run Outlook 2003 with Exchange 2007 and vice versa – Exchange 2003 can work with Outlook 2007. However, in order to take advantage of the newest capabilities described, you do need Outlook 2007.

Use Professional IT Services for Deployment

As with any upgrade, there are challenges to deployment. One of the obvious issues is the 64-bit architecture. You cannot upgrade your existing Exchange Server, even if you are running Exchange 2003 on a 64-bit system. The Schema Master and Global Catalog servers require Windows 2003 SP1. And with the new server roles, you need to determine which roles are needed and how the Edge Server will fit into your security infrastructure. There are many other considerations; we have just named a few.

If you are interested in evaluating or upgrading to Exchange 2007, make sure you talk to your All Covered consultant or seek professional IT expertise. You’ll want to ensure the upgrade is planned and the migration is as smooth as possible.

How All Covered Can Help

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