I must say, the content of this presentation did not match the title. The session was more about Exchange 2010 features, not SP1. While the feature the presenter covered were fine and dandy and some were new to me, what I really wanted was the low-down on SP1. Here are some of Exchange 2010 features that were covered:
– Mailbox moves can now be done online without user disruption. Unlike previous versions of Exchange, a user can access their mailbox (even with OWA) during a mailbox move. This means you can now do mailbox moves during business hours.
– Exchange 2010 has full role-based administration. Through OWA you can configure granular delegation to various Exchange rights. For example, if you have a compliance officer in your organization you can delegate to them e-discovery rights for mailboxes but they won’t have any additional rights in Exchange. Out of the box Exchange comes with over a dozen built-in rights/roles.
– OWA is now integrated with OCS can you can IM directly within OWA. Now you don’t have to juggle OWA and your OCS client or OCS web access. One stop shopping for email and IM.
– In SP1 a user’s archive mailbox can now be separated from their primary mailbox. Their archive mailbox can be in the same database as their primary mailbox, a different database, or hosted in the cloud with Exchange online services. Regardless of where their archive mailbox is hosted, it’s transparent to the user and they can access it via Outlook or OWA.
– You can configure hub transport rules to set retention policies on email, automatically. This is in addition to the automatic digital rights management policies you can configure for encryption, and other restrictions on email.
– In SP1 e-discovery searches now estimate the number of objects that the query will return. This can help you determine up front if the query you are doing is targeted enough or will return a huge amount of data you don’t want. In addition results are de-duplicated, and you can also annotate the results.
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Unfortunately the speaker really missed the boat on covering SP1 changes. I’m sure this session will get very low ratings. But on the positive side I did learn about a few new features in Exchange 2010.
