Exchange 2007 Review

As with every release of Exchange there is a lot of new great functionality, and there are even some improvements to the administration side of things.

Spam filtering has improved tremendously with actual spam filtration services.  Microsoft integrated real spam and virus filtering tools into edge transport servers.  These servers sit outside your AD environment, and must be run as standalone servers which is great for security and are much better than the intelligent message filtering we saw in Exchange 2003.  Another great feature is the long awaited Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging.

Other new features include seamless integration with Office Communications Server 2007 and much more advanced device management of Windows Mobile powered phones.  Device management was available as an addin for Exchange 2003, however, it was flaky and hardly what one would call useful.

Good news — public folders are thing of the past!  Unlike previous versions, Exchange 2007 does not require you to have public folders.

Bad news — even if you don’t use them you still have to migrate when going from 2003 to 2007.  If it’s a fresh install though you can be public folder free — maybe.

New administrative features will make those of us who are unix/scripting admins jump for joy.  Power shell and Exchange Management Shell are very powerful tools.  You can script just about any exchange task that you can imagine -- creating user accounts, delegating control of distribution groups, group mailboxes, etc.  This new command line interface is probably one of my personal favorite features to Exchange 2007.

So before I embark on the negative features, let me go back and touch on the qualities of the new features:

ActiveSync HTML Email Support & Mobile Device management
Those of you BES admin’s out there know how powerful the device management support tools are for Blackberry — and Microsoft stepped up the game in Exchange 2007.  You can remotely wipe devices, pull information, push policies, updates, force passwords, pull information such as number, carrier, versions, etc from the ESM.  The difference between this and Exchange 2003 is it actually works in 2007.  The same addin tools for 2003 were spotty at best.   They outdid the Blackberry — ALMOST though with their support of HTML emails.  Catch: You have to be using Windows Mobile 6.0/6.1.  If you’re using WM5 you’re too bad.  The good news is though that those out there using WM6/6.1 can send and receive HTML emails from their phone when paired with Exchange 2007.  If you have a IMAP account you could already do this on your WM6 phone, but in order to utilize the function in PUSH you had to run Exchange 2007.

Unified Messaging
Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging is probably one of the most useful new things added by Microsoft.  The product has seamless integration with large VoIP PBX systems like Cisco, but be prepared to not get as warm of a reception with older systems from Nortel and Siemens.  It has its limitations and woes, like the inability to properly control message waiting indicator lights — yes you might actually need a third party software application called MWI 2007 to run your little red blinking lights.  Faxing has proven to be more headaches than success, but seems to be promising nonetheless.

So what is unified messaging?  Only about the coolest thing since the microwave.  Unified Messaging is integration of your voicemail and your mailbox.  Voicemails will be delivered to you as a WMA audio file to listen to on your PC, cell phone, or anyplace else you can get your email.  Going the other way, you can have calendar, contacts, or emails read to you over the phone.  Doesn’t stop there, send voicemails or tell your desk phone to call contacts from mailbox, or forward the voicemail to somebody by simply forwarding an email.  It makes staying connected that much easier.  Remote users can now have an extension at corporate that will forward to their VoIP phone, no answer? No problem, there voicemail is delivered to their smart phone as an attachment to listen to anywhere.  Exchange 2007 unified messaging will also tell you that you missed a call and the number via email.

For those of you in a SOHO situation or on a tight budget with little resources to upgrade existing PBX, people have used open source.  There is quite a bit of documentation out there on integrating Asterisk into Exchange 2007.  The tests have all proven successful and give detailed integration capabilities, http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/tip/0,,sid43_gci1284633,00.html

Edge Transport Servers
Another feature I mentioned above, edge servers, are a lot more than I mentioned.  They’re not just a spam and virus filtering servers…they’re essentially dedicated smart hosts or SMTP gateways if you will.  They can sit outside of your AD environment, filter all your email, control the flow of which servers they can go to.  Control attachments and traffic in/out of email server.  They’re a far way off from being the replacement to Postini or Surfcontrol, but they’re leaps and bounds of anything Microsoft has put in Exchange before.

Power shell
Those of us who are Unix admins at hear will love Power shell.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good GUI as much as the next nerd, but I don’t like to leave my keyboard.  If I could control my entire computer from a keyboard I would be much happier — I do for the most part, but there are still things I need to use the mouse for.  Power shell lets me run Exchange from a command line — and daddy like.  As the old saying goes — just script it — power shell makes anything from creating an account to assigning permissions to DL’s easier.

OWA Light — Mozilla Support
It’s not nearly as nice as OWA support for IE, but Microsoft finally supports OWA Light which is great for people using Firefox, Safari, etc.  For anybody that has tried to use OWA in something other than IE you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.
Room/Meeting mailboxes

Anybody who has been using Exchange long is very familiar with group mailboxes.  Usually they’re human resources, or customer service mailboxes, maybe even your help desk.  Point being, any organization that uses exchange has felt the woes of having group mailboxes.  Microsoft has tried to help us as admins with the addition of Room and Meeting mailboxes.  These mailboxes allow us to create these group mailboxes that are different from a regular mailbox.  You can prevent email from being sent to them, or not have them tied to specific users.  It isn’t the miracle replacement we’d all like, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.

Downsides & Con’s
So if there are so many great things about Exchange 2007, what are the cons?  Well as with every Microsoft product there are downgrades to every upgrade.

Exchange System Manager, ESM
Microsoft spent a great deal of time re-training us in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 to a new administration style from Exchange 5.5.  We were able to create accounts, dls, and etc all from AD U&C, in fact, that was the way to create them.  After Exchange Administrators have trained themselves using the admin style of Ex2000 and Ex2003 Microsoft changed it yet again.  Those of you who were Exchange 5.5 admin’s you will find this change refreshing as it takes us back to an administration you’re more familiar with.  Those of you who re-trained yourselves will have to go back and re-learn yet again a new ESM.

Removing Exchange Servers
if that wasn’t bad enough, Microsoft has made it impossible to get rid of dead exchange servers — sorta.  Though, Exchange 2007 is much more forgiving when you do something like remove your server from the domain — never done it, heard of it being done, but never done it myself — it is impossible for you to simply delete a dead server (and those of you saying “big deal it won’t happen to me” then I say HA! because when your cluster blows up you’ll wish you had it).  If your server crashes and you’re in a disaster recovery mode you have to re-install exchange on a new box in restore/recover mode using the same hostname.  If you create a new server and its not the same hostname you will be forever stuck with this unknown exchange server in your organization.  Until you install another server in restore/recover mode.  The only way to remove an Exchange 2007 server is to run a proper uninstall from Add/Remove Programs.

If you think I’m kidding then you don’t have a dead exchange server you can’t delete like me.  Trust me, I’ve tried everything short of ripping it out in ADSI – - a task that has prove more difficult than you might think.  Every Microsoft white paper says the same thing “You have to properly uninstall Exchange, you cannot delete it from the ESM.”

64 Bit Required
Yes, you have to run Exchange 2007 on 64bit hardware.  Congratulations, costly hardware upgrade!  Not that you’re not use to spending unbelievably useless amounts of cash on hardware for Microsoft products anyway, but it is disappointing that those 6 month old 32bit DNS server’s you just de-commissioned or those beefy 32bit citrix servers you had left over from your blade migration just won’t cut it.  Microsoft claims that 64bit hardware ran Exchange 2007 faster — I find this hard to believe seeing as there test results were a little fishy, but I’ll accept it.

Legacy support
Exchange 2007 does not natively support clients earlier than Outlook 2007, including Entourage (sorry mac folk).  Yep you read it right; Exchange 2007 does not natively support clients older than Outlook 2007.  For those of you about to BLAST me and say I’m wrong, read what I wrote, it does not NATIVELY support clients older than Outlook 2007.  Now you really think Microsoft would create a product and not provide a way of supporting the most commonly used application for email: Outlook 2003?  Of course not!  You just need to make sure you tell it that when you install.

If you’re implementing Exchange into an environment that has never used Exchange before, it will ask you during the setup if you want to provide support for legacy clients such as Outlook 2003 and Entourage.  If you click no and install it only to find out later you need legacy support have no fear — power shell to the rescue.  You have to re-create the exchange 2000/2003 virtual folder directories for IIS.  Once these folders are created you can no support legacy clients.

Those of you migrating from Exchange 2000/2003 won’t have to worry about this.  Since you’re migrating from legacy you will automatically get legacy support — it’s required in order to migrate.  Be known though, there are known issues with using legacy clients in Exchange 2007.  If you can upgrade to Outlook 2007 I recommend it, even if you still provide legacy support for your Entourage users.
IMAP/POP3 Functionality are not client specific and will work with any client.

Recap/Closing
Overall Exchange 2007 is an incredibly worth wild and recommended upgrade.  It’s faster, has more useful tools and others perfected.  Its pros completely outweigh its con’s and it is truly the first big step from Microsoft to completely unify all communications in one software package.  As an exchange admin I have a love hate relationship with it, but I certainly love it more than I hate it.  I recommend it to any organization that can take the time to go through the upgrade — no matter how painful it might be.