April 2009 - Posts
The Outlook team is very pleased to announce the official release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, the culmination of months of hard work to bring our users performance and reliability improvements which have been tested and shown to significantly improve the speed and responsiveness of Outlook! This Service Pack is the result of a large and directed effort to make your Outlook 2007 experience great and we think that you will be pleasantly surprised.
The Outlook team targeted your most common daily workflows and made them faster and more dependable. Significant improvements were also made in the areas of launching, synchronizing and reliably searching with Outlook 2007. Users with small to average size mailboxes will see a 26% performance increase and users with large mailboxes will see a 35% performance increase in the following areas:
- Faster startup and more reliable shutdown
- Faster folder switching between folders with a large number of messages
- Better overall responsiveness when performing common tasks
Full story at source
| Language(s): |
English. |
| Product(s): |
Microsoft Forefront. |
| Audience(s): |
IT Professional. |
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| Duration: |
60 Minutes |
| Start Date: |
Thursday, May 28, 2009 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada) |
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Event Overview |
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Microsoft Forefront Security for Office Communications Server (FSOCS) is a newly released product that provides Office Communications Server customers with comprehensive protection against malware and inappropriate content. This session describes how FSOCS secures an IM deployment using multiple engine malware scanning, file blocking and keyword filtering. Learn more about protecting IM with the RTM release of Forefront Security for Office Communications Server.
Presenter: Mike Chan, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Mike Chan is a Senior Product Manager for Forefront Server Security. Previously, he worked on Internet Explorer 7.0 and security for Windows Vista including Windows Defender. Mike has spent most of his career at Microsoft over the past 7 years on projects such as ISA Server 2004, VPN, and security update management. Previous to Microsoft, he was a developer at various companies including Sun Microsystems, VA Linux, Intel and Trilogy.
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More information and registration check source
Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2008 and Vista just released!
Check here for more information http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd262148.aspx
(currently it is not showing yet in the Technet Plus site, could that be due to replication?)
Prerequisites
If you have any beta versions of SP2 installed, they must be un-installed prior to installing
- Use the Control Panel applet "Programs and Features" and select "View installed updates" from the top left of the task pane, under Windows, look for KB94846
You must have a genuine copy of Windows Server 2008 with SP1 or Windows Vista with SP1 installed on the computer prior to installing SP2
- Windows Server 2008 released with the Service Pack 1 code included
- SP2 is the first post-release Service Pack for Windows Server 2008
(The good thing is that the Exchange 2010 Beta can be installed on a Windows Server 2008 SP2.)
Happy patching!
Taken from You had me at EHLO:
Have you ever sent a really well thought out, important email, only to find out (through an automatic response) that the recipient is on vacation for two weeks? For most of us, this means either waiting two weeks for a response or emailing an alternate contact. For the recipient, it means dealing with tons of messages when returning from vacation.
This scenario is one of the many reasons we developed MailTips in Exchange Server 2010. MailTips are there to give you information about your message and its recipients before you hit the send button.
For instance, this MailTip will show you automatic replies for recipients of your message:
When you know that someone is on vacation before you send them a message, you won't waste your time writing it, and they won't have to read as many messages when they get back.
Nice feature!
More details and other examples at source
One of the questions circling in blogworld: Is it possible to place/receive voice calls on the Mac or Linux using OCS R2?
The answer is yes if you leverage the SmartSip technology from MSFT's partner Evangelyze.
You can make and receive voice calls natively on the Mac using a SIP softphone of your choice such as X-lite. This would also apply to any other platform such as Linux. The other value here is you can leverage your existing investment in any existing SIP phones on your campus and connect to OCS voice as well.
Here is a cool demo of Mac Messenger 7's native capabilities with OCS (IM, peer to peer voice calls, video) along with a Mac OS native voice demo (using a free SIP softphone) connecting through SmartSip where the Mac user has been provisioned for OCS enterprise voice:
SmartSIP for Mac - Microsoft Enterprise Voice via X-Lite from Joe Schurman on Vimeo.
As of today a new writer has been added to our little bloggery world! Maarten Piederiet will contribute mostly on Exchange related stuff but who knows what other interesting things might pop up ;)
Thanks for joining and we're looking forward to your contributions!
Not so much Unified Communications related, but such a cool new feature that I had to post this, since it will cause a huge change in the way we can use the Windows clients:
Last Saturday, Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera revealed a secret new feature in Windows 7- Windows XP Mode (XPM). XPM allows you to run Windows XP in a virtualized session, and includes a license for Windows XP SP3. As Thurrott & Rivera's blog post says:
Windows XP Mode dramatically changes the compatibility story for Windows 7 and, we believe, has serious implications for Windows development going forward.
Interestingly, XPM does not require you to run a separate desktop with Windows XP. Applications installed in the virtual environment are published to the Windows 7 host and shortcuts placed in the host's Start menu. Users can run Windows XP applications (installed in XPM) directly and transparently in Windows 7 desktop!
Very cool feature indeed! It seems application compatibility is quickly headed to be a non-issue with Windows 7.
More details in Secret No More: Revealing Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 on Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows, and screenshots in Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 Screens.
On Monday the 27th of April I am going to start attending the MCM program of Office Communications Server.
So my main working area in the upcomming three weeks will be building 11 at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond.
In the mean time I stay at the Redmond Trail appartments, just beside the MSFT area.
And of course, and if I can find the time, I try to share some of my personal experiences at this blog.
From the OCS Team blog:
This article describes the steps taken by Office Communicator to establish a Communicator call between an OC client sitting on a typical home network, connected to the Internet using a NAT router and another OC client placed on the company's internal network. The user initiating the call will be Alice and the data and logs are collected from Alice's computer
The main problem when establishing a media connection (audio or video) between Alice and Bob is finding a way media can travel through the intermediate network, without being blocked. This is where SDP, ICE, STUN and TURN come into the picture.
SDP
Office Communicator uses SDP (Session Description Protocol) to provide initialization parameters for the media stream in an audio or audio/video session. It is a proposed standard published by IETF in several RFCs (e.g. RFC 4566) and completely based on ASCII, which makes it easy to read.
Although SDP helps initializing media flow between two entities, every client is only describing its own view of the connection. If you ever wondered, what side of the media stream the advertised IP addresses in the SDP blob belong to, remember SDP as the "Self Description Protocol".
ICE
The Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) Extensions protocol is used to establish media flow between two endpoints. In typical deployments, NATs or firewalls might exist between the two endpoints that are intended to communicate. NATs and firewalls are deployed to provide private address space and to "secure" the private networks to which the endpoints belong. This type of deployment blocks incoming traffic. If the endpoint advertises its local interface address, the remote endpoint might not be able to reach it. Advertising the address exposed by the NAT or firewall is not as straightforward, because the endpoints would first need to determine the external routable mapping address created by the NAT (NAT-mapped address) for its local interface address. Moreover, NATs and firewalls exhibit differint behavior in the way they create the NAT-mapped addresses. Section 5 of [IETFDRAFT-STUN-02] provides an overview of NAT types.
ICE provides a mechanism to assist media in traversing NATs without requiring the endpoints to be aware of their network topologies. ICE assists by identifying one or more transport addresses, which the two endpoints can potentially use to communicate and ICE determines which transport address is best for both endpoints to use for their media session.
Continue at source
The Three UC amigo's posted a nice article with all the details around the new desktop sharing feature in OCS 2007 R2.
The article includes screenshost examples, an overview of the technical architecture,a list of prerequisites and a list of supported browsers
Full article at source
The updated Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor tool, aka. Exmon, for Exchange 2007 SP1 just got published.
The updated tool can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=9a49c22e-e0c7-4b7c-acef-729d48af7bc9. If the download page says that the version is 14.00.0553.004 - then you are looking at the correct, new version. If it is something else, go ahead and refresh the page as the updated download might still be replicating though Microsoft Download Center.
The updated documentation can be found here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=142433.
The information listed below has been tested using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise Edition R2 supports the use of non default TCP\IP port configurations for network access to its pool configuration databases that are located on the backend SQL server instance. Microsoft SQL Server supports three types of configurations for the Instances that it can host. They are:
Default Instance
The Default Instance is the instance that is installed on the SQL Server that will inherit the host name of the server that SQL Server is installed on. There can only be one Default Instance installation per SQL Server. So any instances that are installed before or after the single Default Instance will have to be a SQL Server Named Instance.
Named Instance
A Named Instance can be installed onto a SQL Server at any time. Microsoft SQL Server can support many Named Instances at one time. Named Instances will use whatever meaningful name that they were given during their installation. For specifics on the number of Named Instances the your version of SQL Server can support please query the SQL Server Books Online help tool or visit the Microsoft SQL Server website and search its technical listings.
Default Instance\Named Instance
This SQL Server installation includes an installed Default Instance along with one or more Named Instances that are installed on the Microsoft SQL Server. The Default Instance will inherit the host name of the server that Microsoft SQL Server is installed on, and any Named Instance will use whatever meaningful name that they were given during their installation. For specifics on the number of Named Instances the your version of SQL Server can support please query the SQL Server Books Online help tool or visit the Microsoft SQL Server website and search its technical listings.
Continue at source
The Outlook team posted an article on how Exchange 2010 together with Office 2010 represents the next wave in the Microsoft Office product family!
This next wave of Office-related products will enable you to be more productive across the PC, phone, and browser. Outlook 2010, together with Exchange, will continue to improve productivity with the ultimate inbox experience, through innovative end-user technologies such as:
- MailTips - Warn users before they commit an e-mail faux pas such as sending mail to large distribution groups, to recipients who are out of the office or to recipients outside the organization, helping protect against information leaks and reducing unnecessary e-mail messages.
- Conversations Management - Not only will Outlook 2010 provide the ability to view, sort, and categorize emails as conversations - using tools like Clean Up and Ignore, people can simply combine related messages to reduce inbox clutter or ignore irrelevant e-mail conversations altogether.
- Familiar Outlook Experiences on Web & Mobile - Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile will provide powerful experiences to Outlook users in web browsers and on Windows Mobile devices to complement Outlook 2010. Key features and experiences around conversations view, search, and connecting with people will be delivered to you on the go, geared specifically for a web browser or a Windows Mobile phone to keep the experience lightweight and fast.
Outlook 2010 represents the latest in creating a powerful and intuitive e-mail client, providing you with a rich set of e-mail management tools to manage your personal and professional life while staying in touch with the people that matter most. New innovations in user interface, search, and people photos are just some of the bold, exciting experiences that await Outlook 2010 users. In this next wave, Outlook will make accessing your e-mail and connecting with people wherever you are - on whatever device you choose - seamless and easier than ever before.
Outlook 2010, along with the rest of the Office 2010 client, will be available for trial in an upcoming technical preview which is slated for Q3 of the 2009 calendar year. This technical preview is meant for people used to testing out software in its initial development stage, and will be followed by a broad public beta, where millions can download and try out Office 2010.
In case you missed, last week the mainstream support on Exchange 2003 ended. (As per 4/14/2009). Of course the Extended support is still available until 4/8/2014, which will probably cost you :)
One more reason to go out-with-old and in-with-the-new!
| Products Released | General Availability Date | Mainstream Support Retired | Extended Support Retired | Service Pack Retired | Notes |
| Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition |
9/28/2003 |
4/14/2009 |
4/8/2014 |
5/25/2005 |
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| Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition |
9/28/2003 |
4/14/2009 |
4/8/2014 |
5/25/2005 |
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| Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1 |
5/25/2004 |
Not Applicable |
Not Applicable |
1/8/2008 |
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| Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 |
10/19/2005 |
Review Note |
Review Note |
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Support ends 12 months after the next service pack releases or at the end of the product's support lifecycle, whichever comes first. For more information, please see the service pack policy at http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/#ServicePackSupport |
Details and updates (if any) here
Exchange 2010 most definitely brings in some new features to allow for a more intuitive and granular administrative experience in terms of how you allow and/or disallow administration from a permissions perspective. But to understand why Exchange 2010 management was designed the way it was, let's take a brief history lesson.
Management History
Exchange 2003 provided management with the Exchange System Manager. Exchange 2007 provided management with the Exchange Management Console (EMC) and the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). You were limited as to what you could do based on what Exchange Management Group you were in.
Exchange 2003 administration groups consisted of:
- Exchange Full Administrator
- Exchange Administrator
- Exchange View Only Administrator
Exchange 2007 administration groups consisted of:
- Exchange Organization Administrators
- Exchange Recipient Administrators
- Exchange View-Only Administrators
- Exchange Public Folder Administrators (New in Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1)
Exchange 2010 Management/Permissions Overview
Exchange 2010 provides a much more comprehensive method for allowing granular control over what users have control of what functions. This functionality is provided by a new Role Based Access Control (RBAC) authorization system. The goal of this system is to provide an easy way to delegate and customize control by granting operations based on role or job function. For example, you can provide your helpdesk certain abilities to perform the job functions they need in a more granular fashion.
The benefit of RBAC is obvious. Many Exchange Administrators found themselves in situations where they needed to provide less privileged administrators additional privileges but did not want to add them into an administration group that gave too much control as this would not conform to principle of least privilege. With RBAC, we can provide this less privileged administrator with the control they need without needing to place this administrator into a group that would provide this administrator with too many unneeded privileges.
The new RBAC model works in all Exchange Management applications; Exchange Management Console, Exchange Management Shell, and the new Exchange Control Panel (ECP). The ECP is a new Management Tool provided in Exchange 2010. It's a web based management console that is targeted towards the end user and administrators alike. It'll allow end users to do simple things such as modify their phone number, if allowed of course.
Because Exchange 2010 utilized PowerShell 2.0, Exchange now has the ability to take advantage of PowerShell Remoting which allows you to remotely manage your Exchange systems; if that didn't already seem obvious by the name PowerShell Remoting.
Continue at source
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