Calendaring
One of the top complains about Exchange 2003 and earlier
additions were their limitations around calendaring. In earlier versions of
Exchange, there was no real concept of "resources" and finding when people and
conference rooms were available was a major challenge in many organizations. In the next section, I will cover some of the common challenges with resource
scheduling and how Exchange 2007 addresses them. In this section, I will go
over how Exchange 2007 addresses some of the major, but not all, of the issues
users had with calendaring.
When trying to book and manage meetings users had to deal
with out of date Free\Busy information, out of date meeting invites, double
bookings, and trying to find when everyone was available. Another related
issue is Out of Office message management.
In Exchange 2003 and earlier meeting request were processed
by the Outlook client. This caused issues when users were off-line, the
meeting would not be accepted until the user started Outlook again. Also in
previous versions, if the meeting organizer updated a meeting all attendees
would get an updated meeting request. If the organizer were to do this
multiple times attendees would have multiple meeting updates in their Inbox for
a single meeting, which leads to confusion and meetings not be updated
correctly in some cases. Furthermore, working hours were not shared as part of
a user's free\busy data.
Free\Busy data was out of date in many cases because the
data was stored in a Public Folder and the Outlook client was required to
publish this data to the Public Folders. By default, Outlook would only update
the data every 15 minutes. Then the user's updated data would then need to be
replicated to other public folders, so users accessing another server for
public folder data could see the updates. Additionally, users had no control
over if their Free\Busy data was published. In Exchange 2007 free\busy data is
now pulled directly from user's mailboxes, by the CA role, and is then
published as a web service. Outlook 2007 or OWA 2007 is required to take
advantage of this new support. Exchange 2007 does also publish free/busy data
to Public Folders, if enabled, for previous clients. Outlook 2007 users can
also control what level of free\busy data is published. Their options are
none, just free\busy time, subject & location, or full meeting
information. The calendar attendant in E2k7 runs on the server, with the CA
role, to monitor meeting updates in user's mailboxes and updates their
mailboxes automatically, keeping only the most recent update in their Inbox. It also monitors for meeting request that were forwarded by an attendee to new
attendees and updates the meeting organizers meeting so future updates to the
meeting are sent to the new attendees also. For updates that don't change the
time or location the calendar attendant will change the meeting update message
to show that only the meeting details were changed and leaves an informative
update in attendees mailboxes.
When it comes to booking meetings, Outlook and OWA 2007 has
been updated to make it easier for users to see what dates and times are
available by color-coding dates on the calendar and suggesting the best dates
and times in a list sorted by most available attendees. In addition, when
selecting users or resources you can now easily see if they are available before
adding them to the meeting.
The last item is OOF or out of office settings. Now in
Exchange 2007 users can set their OOF ahead of time by choose the date the
message should start and stop. In addition, users can also set a separate OOF
message for internal and external users. Lastly, the OOF message can contain
rich text formatting. All of these settings can also be controlled by an
administrator to prevent users from creating internal, external, or either OOF
messages.
So these calendaring changes will require testing to fully
understand their impact to the organization. Microsoft has a full session on
Improvements to Calendaring in Exchange 2007 here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/events/exchange2007/exc-108.mspx. Also check out this TechNet blog post on Smart
Scheduling in Outlook 2007.
Resource mailboxes
With Exchange 2003 you only had one type of mailbox; in
Exchange 2007 you now have four types of mailboxes. These types include "User
Mailbox", "Room Mailbox", "Equipment Mailbox" and "Linked Mailbox." All four
of these "types" are still normal mailboxes to Exchange, but with different
attributes set on them. The Room and Equipment mailboxes are flagged as such
so Outlook 2007 and higher can correctly booked them. Linked Mailboxes just
prompt you during creation for what external account should be granted full
control over it, saving a step from previous versions of Exchange. Room
Mailboxes are automatically added to a new address list called All Rooms that
Outlook and OWA 2007 use when booking a meeting. These clients allow the user
to click on a Rooms button and are show just resource mailboxes of the type
Rooms. Furthermore, room and equipment mailboxes can have attributes add to
them that define when they can be booked, who can book them, the quantity
(equipment) that exit, the size (room), the type, how long they can be booked,
and more. See TechNet help on Managing
Resource Mailboxes, Set-MailboxCalendarSettings
cmdlet, and How
to Set Resource Booking Policies for more info.
UM
As with any new technology unified messaging must be
evaluated for its benefits and costs and its pros and cons verse other
solutions. UM is especially important to test because voice mail and faxes are
often thought to be more trustworthy and reliable then e-mail. UM also
involves new technology, terms, and interfacing with PBX, VoIP gateway, etc
that are completely foreign to most Exchange administrators. While Exchange
2007 does provide unified messaging "support" it requires additional hardware,
software\drivers, and working with telephony people, who are also new to
Exchange. With the dozens, if not hundreds, of PBX solutions and faxing boards
on the market, research and testing is essential to find the most appropriate
solution, provide hands on experience, and the education needed to support voice
mail and incoming fax integration.
Legal discovery and message forensics
While this area might not be new to some organizations those
that are in the financial and healthcare industry are very aware of the
implications in this area. Unlike previous versions of Exchange, that required
3rd party solutions to even address the basic needs in this area,
Exchange 2007 provides at least basic support that might met the needs of some
organizations. Using the EMS an administration can now easily search for
messages that contain certain keywords, senders, or recipients, and export the
matches to a PST with a single command.
These features must be evaluated and tested to ensure the
meet the requirements of your organization. In addition, though documentation
must be developed, tested, and might even need to be reviewed by legal experts
to ensure the correct chain of evidence is in place when needed.
Mobile access
As more companies embrace, or are forced to by their users
or executives, mobile messaging solutions this area becomes very business
critical. BlackBerry has enjoyed over five years of dominance in this area and
if Windows Mobile devices are going to replace such devices they must be secure
and reliable. Therefore, how they are configured, secured, and supported needs
to be tested and documented. For those organizations that have been using
Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) devices with the Microsoft
Security Feature Pack the changes in Exchange 2007 will not be that
drastic. But there are new features and changes in Exchange 2007 RTM and SP1 that
allow WM devices to compete but also add additional complexity.
See TechNet Overview of
Exchange ActiveSync and this EHLO blog post
for a bit on what's coming in SP1.
Managed Folders
In Exchange 2003 Mailbox Manager could be used to setup policies
to removed older and large items from folders in a user's mailbox. The
policies could either delete items directly, place them in a system clean-up
folder, or in Delete Items. While manage manger worked was OK, in theory, it
tended to not work as expected was fairly limited in what it could do. Also
since Exchange 2000 was introduced the world has changed due to SOX, GLBA, and
many other regulatory acts and legal requirements. Because of these
regulations some organizations are required to keep certain e-mails for 3, 5,
or even more years based on their content. On the hand other organizations
want to ensure all e-mails older than a certain date are deleted, except for
ones that are required for business or regulator purposes. Managed folders can
address both needs are part of Microsoft's Messaging Records Management (MRM)
strategy. If you are one of those organizations that are required to keep
certain e-mails and\or delete others Managed Folders might provide some of the
functionality needed.
Conclusion
As you can see from this article that A LOT has changed in
Exchange 2007! Therefore, extensive testing and planning will be required to
smoothing deploy it. Even though I tried to touch on most of the changed there
are many more that aren't included here. Hopefully this article can be used as
justification to management on the importance of testing Exchange 2007 but also
to help justify why you should migrate. Microsoft has done an excellent job
with Exchange 2007 by listening to its customers and addressing some of the
major issue with the previous versions.
