First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta 274
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a first look at Microsoft's Exchange Server 2010 Beta, noting several usability, reliability, and compliance improvements over Exchange 2007. Top among Exchange 2010's new features are OWA support for Firefox 3 and Safari 3; improved storage reliability; conversation views; mail federation between trusted companies; and MailTips, a sort of Google Mail Goggles for the corporate environment. 'Database availability groups give you redundant mail stores with continuous replication; database-level failover gives you automatic recovery. I/O optimizations make Exchange less "bursty" and better suited to desktop-class SATA drives; JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.' Exchange 2010 will, however, require shops to upgrade to Windows Server 2008, as support for Windows Server 2003 has been dropped. Microsoft will release technical previews of other products in the suite, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010, in the third calendar quarter."
Blah (Score:3, Insightful)
I kind of like it when my mail server is, you know, just a mail server. Call me a nut but SMTP + IMAP do everything I need.
Re:Blah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but you're not a large corporation. Exchange does all kinds of crazy shit that's nice to have in a very large environment. Calendaring, extreme scalability, integration with other systems, mobile messaging integration, spam filtering, encryption support, voicemail integration, auditing compliance. etc... and etc... and etc...
Exchange does a _whole_ lot of shit and integrates with other products that do a whole lot of other shit.
So if you have 50 employees and 40 computers, Exchange might be overkill. If you have 40,000 employees, it might be exactly what you need.
Worthless review... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then his second favorite feature is that you can do database level real time replication - you know, without having to know about all that REALLY hard stuff, like RAID, or what this SCSI crap is, or backups.
non-outbreak client support? (Score:1, Insightful)
Wake me when they release some kind of server-end support for clients like thunderbird/sunbird, evolution, etc. It shouldnt be the job of a major project like that to reverse-engineer MS's garbage.
Or just publish the specs and comply to the related standards... but let's not ask for the moon AND the stars, eh?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because most companies dont want to hire competent EMail admins. Any of the MCSE monkeys can administer the Exchange server. No they cant administer it correctly but they can administer it. You really do need a competent email admin staoff to use exchange, but it's not as daunting as the FOSS or other options out there to windows It staff.
I also dont understand the love affair with outlook, It's simply that some PHB's hate change and they used Exchange as the killing point to stop OSS infiltration.
Re:Blah (Score:4, Insightful)
People underestimate how important Exchange is.
The argument is always how Office is the real lynchpin and that if only a compatible document suite like Google docs or OpenOffice got a foothold Microsoft would be crushed but Outlook/Exchange is the REAL barrier to entry.
I work at a call center. EVERY corporate employee who calls me is using Outlook except the 1% of poor souls stuck with Lotus Notes and Domino.
Business relies on Outlook/Exchange.
Will it work nicely with Thunderbird? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exchange Server 2007 gave the bird to Thunderbird. Will Server 2010 support Thunderbird or Seamonkey? Or will Linux desktops be second class citizens in an Exchange Server corporate setup?
That's the only feature of interest to me...
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
if you have an iphone or winmo you can point your phone to a corporate email server and it will download all your email into the phone as long as you have a signal. and the IT department can manage all the phones remotely.
say your hippy marketing exec loses his or her iphone and it has all kinds of data on it. the IT people can just wipe it remotely not caring where it is.
say you have to keep all email for at least 7 years but you don't want it in anyone's mailbox. right now you have to buy a third party product. Exchange 2010 integrates it.
say you want failover to another city with all your company's email there. Exchange 2007 and later.
Even the FOSS Exhcange clones don't come close. For a medium to large business it's cheaper to buy Exchange with all the features than pay for add on software and more people to admin it
Re:OWA Support for Firefox and Safari (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally. Sheesh. No reason why this couldn't have been implemented years ago instead of relegating them to OWA Lite.
Yeah, no reason except that it's just one more reason why your desktops don't have to run Windows...
Re:OWA Support for Firefox and Safari (Score:3, Insightful)
Its not all that rich but it works just fine. Don't know what this is all about.
Are they going to make the experience the same for both IE and FireFox?
Re:Will it work nicely with Thunderbird? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
support for mobile .. access
Bingo. This is the reason that we haven't moved away from Exchange. Windows Mobile connected to Exchange with DirectPUSH is a great combination for mobile users.. you can synchronise all your contacts, calendar, tasks and email with Exchange remotely. Email actually arrives on the mobiles a second or two before showing up in Outlook. Our Exchange server would be replaceable if it weren't for this. I almost replaced it with OpenExchange until I found out about this feature, which has now become essential to a lot of our sales team. If the blackberry network (and devices) weren't so shit then maybe I'd reconsider (the number of times I used to have our blackberry users blaming me for email not working when in fact it was the blackberry network, something which I have no control over.. eurghh..). There is a lot of room for a nice FOSS email client/server product on an open mobile platform..
Re:so we're (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want what Microsoft offers, you have to play by their rules. If the product is good and the rules are not onerous, then there's no problem. Proprietary software, despite its drawbacks, has been a useful and successful means for delivering value for over 50 years.
On the other hand, if the product is lacking and/or the rules are onerous, then you need to go with another vendor.
As much as I love a chance to bash Microsoft, I really don't see this as being an "onerous" requirement, especially since it probably helps the poor schmoes who have to write and maintain the code (although that would certainly have been much more compelling when the likes of Windows 9x was the OS no longer being supported), which hopefully means more stable and robust software.
If you are looking at the expense and effort to use Exchange, I imagine dropping another thousand (or whatever a Windows Server license costs these days) to upgrade the OS is pocket change in comparison to the Exchange licensing and dedicated hardware and support personnel you need to run the thing. We're not talking Office or IE here... or even SQL Server.
Re:Will it work nicely with Thunderbird? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps IMAP was not enabled in that Exchange setup...it definitely works, though.
However, to answer your original problem (Firefox and HTML mail), Exchange 2010 does support Firefox (and Safari) using all the features of OWA that IE does, including HTML mail compose.
Re:Concatenation a feature?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
You misread... That's for the REPLICATED copy. i.e. You keep your live database on RAID 1/0, but you keep the realtime replicated copy on JBOD. With EXCH 2007 microsoft began (for very good reasons) recomending DAS instead of SAN (due to application and database high availablility features of Exchange 2007). Now, half of your DAS modular array units don't require expensive controllers, further reducing your costs without detracting from availability. Since the server fron end no longer needs to be a microsoft Cluster as well, Enterprise Server is no longer a requirement either.
We recently deployed a 20K user solution under Exch2007. We lobied for a modular extensible DAS storage solution, but instead upper management insisted on big iron SAN chassis (2 of them). We spent $450K on disks where we could have spent less than 100K and had the same performance and reliability simply because upper management (and apparently you) have not read or do not understand the new database architecture proposed in Exchange 2007. 2010 improves upon that by removing some server side hurdles while maintaining the same data reliablity.
You're keeping 2-3 local, active, asynchronously replicated (with real time log rollback) copies of your exchange system, with 30 second or less automatic failover that does not disconnect users in the process. Why keep them all on RAID 10 if you can simply fail from one over to the other? The only reason to keep any 1 of them on RAID 10 is simply to keep from failing over the first time! (and you'll recover and be back on the RAID 10 in 24-48 hours and you still have redundancy in log shipping, offsite server replication, and traditional backups to supplement that, all without clusters!
Re:Worthless review... (Score:5, Insightful)
For sysadmins who want their users to stick with Firefox or something else not named Internet Explorer, an improvement to OWA may not be a huge deal but it's still nice. OWA on alternative browsers blows pretty hard. It works, but it blows.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, it would be REALLY NICE if MSFT would put Exchange inside of something other than a Jet engine database... Then maybe I could have a high performance database that wasn't capped at 200GB for performance reasons, and I could have one big database per server cluster instead of 12-16... and I could front end that with a half a dozen exchange servers and have all 20,000 users inside of a single database and eliminate all the wasted space from single indexing!
For Chrsits sake, can't the Exchange people and the SQL people work together, and combine the log shipping asynchronous non-cluster replciation features of exchange with a REAL F*ING DATABASE ENGINE!?!?!?!
Re:Blah (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of misses the point. In many cases of Microsoft products, you could weave and configure together a bunch of FOSS applications to do the same thing. But then you'd have a custom solution that only your now-very-valuable admin understands. On the other hand, Exchange is a one stop shop for all this stuff, and the admins are pretty much interchangeable, since the product is the same.
Mail servers for large corporations are not just, well, mail servers. For a 200 person shop, full Exchange is definitely overkill (which is why there's multiple versions you can buy). For a 300K person company, it worth the cost.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with your point, but must say that your abrasive tone makes this AC understand why IT folks get such a bad rap. It's similar to why people dislike police so much. I consider myself a "competent" e-mail admin, but the several Exchange servers I administer only constitute about 3% of the servers I am responsible for, so I don't really have time to focus on them as much as I would like.
Re:ever used a calender? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exchange has evolved a lot. Take Exchange 2007 for example. On an internet-facing server, it is quite easy to enable anti-spam rules. Even better, they get updated weekly directly from MS. You can also add your favorite antivirus utility (you will end up paying "enterprise prices for it) to scan incoming and outgoing mail for CYA reasons. You also can add server to server connectors between companies so E-mail between your company and a customer never touches the Internet in the clear.
There is one thing I do wish Exchange 2007 had built in, and that would be some sort of application level backup mechanism for mailboxes. As of now, if you want to back up users, you will need to spring for a third party utility such as Backup Exec, Retrospect, or Microsoft's own Data Protection Manager.
Maybe the suggestion of making the backend of Exchange a SQL Server database is a good one. This way, mailboxes can be handled with the ton of DB tools available.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
What is special about "electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage."
Not having to run a dozen different, barely interoperable end-user applications to achieve it.
Re:Will it work nicely with Thunderbird? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who is modding this guy up?
IMAP is enabled on ALL MAILBOXES in Exchange 2007 by default. You just have to configure a few settings and enable the service. You can also disable IMAP globally.
To answer your previous assertion that Thunderbird doesn't work - you're wrong again. Our user base uses Thunderbird extensively. Like many universities, we used to push Eudora, waaaay back before we moved to Exchange 5.5, and a lot of professors liked Eudora enough that they will never use Outlook. Thunderbird is the most suitable replacement for Eudora that we've been able to identify. It works great with or without SSL encryption, using POP or IMAP.
So seriously, you very obviously don't have a clue. Please stop with the misinformation.
Re:striped? (Score:2, Insightful)
And a point about JBOD being useful for Exchange. In most Exchange environments I have worked with, replication happens at the appication layer, with huge portions of the data store being replicated amongst members of the Exchange Cluster, each with their own copy of the data. While expensive RAID/physical redundancy is a good idea, it is not critical as exact copies of the data store are available elsewhere in the cluster, and mailboxes can be failed over to those members.
And for the people that want a full RDBMS or SQL Server under the hood of Exchange - this is primarily a performance concern. Exchange access to data stores has such a unique profile that ca be modeled to show specific performance profiles that would benefit from a customized data access layer, overall Exchange performance would be hampered by the inclusion of an RDBMS that was designed to respond to a multitude of performance profiles. When you have the luxury of understanding how your application accesses data, it is best to choose (or develop) the data storage subsystem that will reap you the best performance. Here is where I believe Microsoft has the right approach.
Re:Backup, Replication and Archiving (Score:3, Insightful)
When all your salesforce wants Their blackberry email and calenders seamlessly synchronized with multiple desktops or notebooks, and when you need to be able to wipe a blackberry remotely when it's lost or stolen, then exchange starts to buy something for you.
Particularly the mobile support and the ability to create meeting notices with people not even on your network is very valuable
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but really, you're wrong. I'd love to believe you, because then we could all just drop Exchange and everything would be good. What you're saying may contribute to Exchange's place in the corporate world, but it's not the complete answer.
But show me another email package that provides all the same things. Integrated email, contacts, calendar, the ability to send/receive meeting invites, role delegation, public folders, support for mobile devices (w/push and remote wipe), single sign-on, advanced AJAX web client as well as desktop client... I'm missing some things. Those are just the major features off the top of my head.
Oh, right, you're going to tell me about Zimbra and Scalix, except those don't seem to work as well as FOSS people claim, and besides not all of the components are FOSS. Or you're going to post something about some package that no one has ever heard of, but you'll swear it's great. When I investigate, it'll turn out to be some not-really FOSS package that doesn't work at all and has only been in development for 2 months. Or you'll tell me, "I don't care about your features," in which case, great, that's why you can use a FOSS alternative and the rest of us can't.
Sorry, I need a trustworthy and functioning alternative from a major vendor (who I can safely assume will exist in 2 years). Maybe Apple will be a contender once Snow Leopard comes out, but your IMAP/POP3 server isn't really in the same class of product.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Business people have funny ideas. In my experience they want everything integrated and everyone using the same software. They think it's cool that someone that mailed once 6 months ago is in their address book.
I might be too far along the "Dark Side" (TM)... but why exactly is that a bad idea? I think it's a nifty feature, myself.
I'm under instruction to produce some stationary for outlook because the CFO wants a logo in his emails. I've explained to him that it's stupid. I've shown him base64 encoded binary attachments on the mail spool. I explained the increase in message size and storage requirements for sent email. Futile. Like the bit in American Psyhco where they're all flashing business cards, his peer group are impressed by recieving email with a company logo.
Are you stupid yourself??? Why would your CFO care about how many bytes an encoded binary attachment takes, or how it looks in base64 of all things !!! Just tell him "Yes sir, it will cost U$ XXXX in added storage costs, do you still want to go ahead sir?", that's all he wants to understand or care about.
Much like some of us don't care how exactly your car works as long as it takes you there (even though it's not a bad idea to know a bit), your CFO doesn't want to or cares to know how his logo goes.
Even further, if he thinks a company logo on his emails will result in more business opportunities, I think he's right to implement that. YOU are not the target of those logoed emails, it's other people like him !!!
/anti-rant + rant (sorry for the flamebaitish name-calling)
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:1, Insightful)
Because most companies dont want to hire competent EMail admins. Any of the MCSE monkeys can administer the Exchange server. No they cant administer it correctly but they can administer it. You really do need a competent email admin staoff to use exchange, but it's not as daunting as the FOSS or other options out there to windows It staff.
Correct, businesses want all the benefit of in-house mail servers that do everything Exchange does (which is to say, unparalleled feature set) without having to hire a person JUST to deal with the mail server. I'm not a great mail server admin, but I can keep Exchange running across two sites, no problem. I provide my users with a ridiculous amount of functionality with a minimum amount of management time on my part. None-the-less, most *nix options scare the daylights out of me.
Poor argument to make if you're supporting OSS.
I also dont understand the love affair with outlook, It's simply that some PHB's hate change and they used Exchange as the killing point to stop OSS infiltration.
Outlook makes use of those 80,000 quirky little features that Exchange supports... and the interface, IMHO, is fantastic. I have my own problems with it, but I've yet to find anything close. But this is just personal preference.
Re:Now Let's Talk Pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
Exchange is pretty cheap compared to the competition. That's probably one of the reasons why it is so popular.
Re:Blah (Score:2, Insightful)
Umm....
Collaborative calendaring? Ability to delegate rights for your calendar and inbox to other employees? (Admin assistants) Ability to book physical resources for your appointments?
These are all mission-critical features for most medium to large businesses and as far as I've seen no open source solution comes close offering all the features of Outlook/Exchange. I'm sure some enterprising young lad might be able to hobble all the technology together but that is entirely different from having 1 product that just does the job - a hobbled together solution isn't going to take the enterprise by storm.
Again, this is the stumbling block for Linux adoption in the enterprise. Word, Excel, Power Point interoperability means nothing without an Exchange replacement.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I like SQL Server 2005. It may not have the scalability or performance that Oracle has, but it makes up for it in simplicity and ease of use. I have several customers with SQL Server databases in the 40-60 GB range accessed almost constantly via Java web services and rarely do we see so much as a hiccup. The tools are fairly easy to use and intuitive, and I like how the system tables/views are laid out: between standard SQL, the information schema, and TSQL, I have found only one task I could not accomplish. However, given that SQL is not NP-complete, I simply offloaded that logic (recursive lookup) to the application, not the SQL or stored procedures. Oracle could have done it, but it still would have been slower than just grabbing the data and processing it in a language better suited to it anyway.
Visual Studio is an excellent development environment. Recent versions are about as C/C++ standards-compliant as any open source offering, and the debugger is probably the best on the planet. Between the rock-solid and intuitive IDE, the strong compiler/standard library, I have no complaints there. I am talking standard C/C++ however, not .NET.
Other than that, I have to agree, much of the rest of their software is junk. Windows is a resource hog. Outlook+Exchange makes me cry every day at work: poor performance, lost connections, slow searching, and worst of all, it encourages top-posting. Office uses those awful ribbons that make me want to throw my monitor through the cubical wall.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no way that someone without any FOSS experience could set up a FOSS mail server in 2 hours. You are deluded if you think they could.
yum install postfix
/etc/init.d/postfix start
emerge postfix
apt-get install postfix
Hell I just did it in at least 3 different distros with what would have only taken a quick google search.
So, it's actually a very simple and obvious fact, rather than a delusion. So that's 5 minutes out of my 2 hours gone and I have a working mail server. Plenty of time from my 2 hours left over for learning how to configure 20 or more different features.
Almost anyone one with half decent Windows server experience can be trained up quickly to admin an exchange server. The same can't be said for most FOSS systems out there. If you don't understand that then you are a one eye FOSS fanboi.
If you don't understand that most of this shit really isn't all that complicated in most instances and that any reasonable intelligent person can quickly learn to admin a new application given that they already have good general admin skills, then it is you who are obviously the sad and deluded fanboy.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:2, Insightful)
Meanwhile, following your example... okay, we need to integrate with Active Directory, so that means setting up Samba, pam, winbind, and Kerberos. If you're lucky, you have Likewise installed and can work it in that way. Then, we can get Postfix installed... but that's just e-mail. Okay, now we need calendaring... erm... iCal? Wait, we also need webmail, so that means setting up Apache (Exchange sets up IIS automatically) and then getting whatever e-mail/calendaring solution you have talking to it... right. Of course, there is Zimbra and its ilk, but it really doesn't take long for the subscriptions to cost more than Exchange in the long run.
Now, just so I'm not misunderstood, do I think that doing things the "long way" will work out better in the long run? Sure, probably. If you're setting up e-mail for a few thousand people or so, you're going to need to spend some time planning it and, if you happen to have the experience and knowledge to pull off a custom solution, more power to you. On the other hand, if you're taking care of e-mail for a few hundred people, Exchange really isn't half bad, especially if you really don't have the time (or the resources) to sit down and try every conceivable e-mail/calendaring/web access solution. Like most things Microsoft, it's not great, but it's "good enough".
Last but not least, Exchange 2007 did a fine job of pooching that. I know I took a much more serious look at other groupware systems after dealing with that beast. Exchange 2003 was quirky and a little unreliable, but at least it installed cleanly and didn't have a bunch of silly "roles". For single server environments, Exchange 2007 was a HUGE step backwards. Mind you, I'm sure the clear subdivision of roles made life easier in multi-server environments, but if FOSS can come up with a similarly priced and slightly easier to administer alternative (getting close!), they'll eat MS alive.