What the forthcoming Exchange SP1 makes better

Microsoft Exchange 2010 brought with it a variety of impressive changes. Some of the new features are not immediately obvious; for the most part, the Exchange management interfaces, the Exchange Management Console (EMC GUI interface), and the Exchange Management Shell (EMS PowerShell interface) look the same. But there are monumental changes to the storage architecture, to the high-availability features, and to unified messaging.

Further upgrades will come in Service Pack 1, due out later this year. For example, consider three new Exchange 2010 features that are being improved in SP1.

Personal archiving The personal archiving feature was inspired by the fact that mailbox size restrictions leave many users storing data locally in .pst files rather than in their mailboxes. That’s problematic — the data isn’t backed up and is left undiscoverable (or discoverable at great cost when you have to search for it through .pst files). Exchange 2010’s new personal archive feature provides users with an alternate storage location for historical messaging data, eliminating the need for .pst files. At the same time, the archive folder is associated with the user’s mailbox and is handled by Exchange — it’s no longer spread across users’ PCs.

SP1 takes this further by providing the flexibility, if desired, to place the mailbox in one database and the archive in another. The Exchange development team received feedback indicating that archive data, being accessed less frequently, may not need to be on the same disks and in the same database as the mailbox data.

With SP1, you can provision the mailbox and archive separately. You can even use different high-availability features and have different backup strategies for each. This is a sensible enhancement to an already practical feature in Exchange 2010.

Note that the personal archive feature is currently limited to Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web Access (OWA) 2010 users. However, an update to Outlook 2007, timed with Exchange Server 2010 SP1, will enable Outlook 2007 users the ability to access email in the personal archive as well.

E-discovery and search You might have missed the discovery capability when going through Exchange 2010’s new features because it has an odd name: It’s called “multimailbox search” and does not use some form of the term “e-discovery.” The multimailbox search goes beyond the standard Exchange search (although it too leverages the content indexes) to provide a deeper level of discovery. Even though I like the feature for smaller businesses, I still encourage larger companies to look into e-discovery products that do more of the heavy lifting, such as NearPoint for Exchange, SonaVault, Quest Archive Manager, and GFI MailArchiver.

Also, the multimailbox search feature is found in the new Exchange Control Panel (ECP) and, if you’re an Exchange admin, via the Exchange Management Shell. That placement essentially hides multimailbox search from the people who typically need to perform these kinds of searches: records managers, legal or compliance officers, and HR pros — not Exchange admins. The people doing actual e-discovery work are highly unlikely to know ECP even exists.

SP1 will bring three new e-discovery features to the table:

• A search preview feature that provides basic estimates on the resulting number of items, with keyword stats, for early case assessment (it can help you know if you’re going in the right direction so that you don’t waste time on searches that yield worthless results).
• A search deduplication option that will copy only one instance of a message that might be housed in multiple mailboxes (reducing the time it takes to go through the same email in multiple mailboxes).
• An annotation feature that allows you to make notes regarding your reviewed items.

It’s great stuff overall — but do these enhancements eliminate the need for third-party e-discovery products? I’ll let you know once I get my hands on SP1 and try out the new search capabilities.

Exchange Control Panel The ECP seemed somewhat bogus when I read about it, but when I used it for the first time, I thought, “What an awesome way to perform management tasks (though not high-end ones, mind you) through OWA.” It isn’t for admins only; users have a variety of self-service capabilities through it as well.

SP1 brings a bit more to the table, allowing admins to create transport rules, journal rules, and MailTips; provision the personal archive; configure a legal hold on a mailbox and different mobile device policies; and handle role-based access control (RBAC) management. There are lots of great new features coming to the ECP.

And more to come Based on the Exchange team’s blog post, a full list of what’s coming in SP1 will be on TechNet soon.

If there are any additional features you’d like to see in Exchange, by all means and I’ll make sure the Exchange team sees your requests.

This article, “What the forthcoming Exchange SP1 makes better,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com.