Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 brims with new features

They made me sign another nondisclosure agreement, and they were serious. At first I was smirking a bit because it’s Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2. I mean, how top secret can a service pack be? These Redmondians, just taking themselves a little too seriously.

But then they started running me through the guts of the update. First off, sure, it’s got bug fixes. Little things, like bcc: information not being so, well, blind. A little something about the Information Store grabbing way more CPU resources than it should in certain situations.

Administrators will get new toys with SP2 as well. For example, Microsoft has addressed what’s long been a sore spot with me: a lack of replication and permissions management controls. The company has added new functionality in this department with SP2, and so far, I’m liking it. There’s other stuff, including better support for GroupWise and better management of things like offline contact stores, but my main day-to-day plus has to be the permissions management features.

The sexy stuff starts with new features. Microsoft is definitely looking to cash in on America’s gadget craze: Exchange is now capable of a variety of new smartphone and PDA-type features, centering on something called Direct Push Technology. This deal sends out whatever Exchange information the user’s entitled to, including not only e-mail but calendaring, contacts, the whole shebang.

What’s nice is that this push is fairly intelligent. First off, it’s encrypted, and the Redmondians showed me a live demo of just how quick a transfer could be. Further speeding things up is that large messages and attached files are truncated. You can view pieces and then decide whether it’s something you need to see in its entirety or to spare the bandwidth for something else.

But Direct Push doesn’t stop there. It’s also a fast syncer. That means when your PDA is set to receive e-mail from a certain account, and that account receives a message, it’s only a few seconds before that e-mail is transferred and available on your mobile device. They demoed this again, and it was fairly impressive after a minor little hiccup.

All the speedy downloading, however, makes some of us security-conscious folks antsy. So Microsoft has beefed up this aspect of Exchange, too. SP2 adds a number of security considerations specifically for mobile devices, including robust password management, device locking, and a number of administrator tools that allow you to wipe the device remotely should it be lost or stolen. (Knew I should have devved that software when I thought of it.)

Outside of pure mobile considerations, SP2 offers new security for the deskbound set as well. The Exchange Intelligent Message Filter has gotten even more intelligent about phishing. This is the back end of something that was promised with IE7. Under Exchange, the filter has been beefed up to identity a much broader variety of spam and a whole slew of new phishing scheme-type messages.

It also has new tools designed to block such messages before they even get to the user. Microsoft has embedded new support for Sender ID e-mail authentication, which it’s turned against phishing schemes by ensuring that incoming messages check out with authentic sender IDs before passing them on. This can put a serious dent in those messages you’ve been getting from PayPal, eBay, and the like asking for pins and such. I can’t vouch for their effectiveness, as we haven’t been able to test SP2 against a modern mess of spam as yet, but reports from outside Microsoft are positive so far.

Redmond tried to confuse me with a slew of sexy gadget phones wired into its SP2 demo — and indeed, I was taken with a particular smartphone, the Orange SPV M5000. But when we got our SP2 discs into a nice, dry datacenter with no toys in sight (except for my robot dinosaur, of course), we found the update to be a truly effective bit of administrative software. It’s been up in two datacenters for us since we received the code, and so far, no incompatibilities to mention.

For Exchange admins with a growing mobile force, this is definitely worth the installation. But even for those without vast numbers of smart devices, SP2 still has significant administrative potential.

Oh, and yes, it’ll work with Small Business Server, but it will also be rolled into the next SBS update.