A few months back, I wrote a bit about what to expect in the next version of Microsoft Exchange Server. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about Exchange Server 2007 (formerly codenamed E12) but couldn’t repeat much of it. The following highlights are some of the additional information that was made public in Eileen Brown‘s presentation at last week’s Microsoft Technical Roadshow, starting with Exchange Server product progress (since the launch of Exchange Server 2003):

• October 2003 – Exchange Server 2003 and Office System 2003 released.
• May 2004 – Exchange Server 2003 service pack 1 (SP1) released.
• September 2004 – Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) released (more about ExBPA).
• February 2005 – Microsoft buys Sybari.
• July 2005 – Microsoft buys FrontBridge.
• October 2005 – Exchange Server SP2 released.
• December 2005 – Exchange Server “E12” beta 1.
• March 2006 – Hosted Exchange services.
• Mid-2006 – Exchange Server 2007 CTP
• June/July 2006 – Exchange Server 2007 beta 2.
• Late 2006 Exchange Server 2007 RTM.
• Early 2007 Exchange Server 2007 general availability.

Key new features with Exchange Server 2007 (some of which I’ve written about previously) include:

• The use of 64-bit server technology facilitates a reduction in input/output operations and hence allows more databases (with larger mailboxes) to be placed on each server.
• High availability enhancements, allowing increased data and service availability: database continuous replication (either local or clustered) allows daily full backups to be replaced with weekly full backups and daily incrementals the second copy of the database plays the transaction logs from the first as they are written, meaning that it is never more than once transaction log behind the first; and there is now support for geoclustering.
• Improved mobile e-mail, including push e-mail, policy-based provisioning and security.
• Improved system management tools: a new MMC 3.0-based Exchange System Manager and the Exchange Management Shell (running on Windows PowerShell).
• Automatic client configuration.
• Encrypted and signed intra-organisation e-mail (by default) and encryption at the gateway (where supported) for business-to-business e-mail with no additional client requirements.
• New message hygiene functionality.
• Message journalling at the transport level with new data retention rules and a new content indexer, allowing a multiple-mailbox search with low CPU impact and fast re-indexing.
• Improvements in Outlook cached mode operation.
• Integration with SharePoint folders.
• New AD schema extensions for resource mailboxes (room or equipment) as well as an all rooms address list.
• Meeting requests can now be accepted or declined within a preview (no need to open the message).
• A to-do bar allowing tasks to roll over to the next day if they have not been completed.
• Ability to view multiple calendars overlaid on one another.
• An improved scheduling assistant that provides hints to the best times for all meeting attendees as well as tentatively accepting new requests, automatically handling updates to meeting information and removing out of date meeting requests/updates.
• Calendar sharing is now more granular, with the ability to deny all access, show time and free/busy status only, show time, subject, location and free/busy status, or show full details, even down to a per-user level.
• Schedules can be set for out of office replies.

From a client perspective, Outlook 2007 provides the richest user experience (when connected to Exchange Server 2007, although it will also work with previous versions); however Outlook Web Access (OWA) is now almost as good. There’s also Outlook Mobile for Windows Mobile 5.0 and the ability to interact with Exchange’s unified messaging functionality from a phone.

Exchange Server 2007 offers significant improvements over 2003 and earlier versions; however it will be interesting to see if these improvements are enough to entice the many companies that are still running basic e-mail services using Exchange Server 5.5 to upgrade their systems.

I’ve not been doing as much work with Exchange Server as I’d like in recent years; so when a friend asked me to help out with carry out an Exchange Server 5.5 to 2003 migration for one of his contacts I was happy to get involved (although I was slightly nervous as this was effectively a refresher course for me being carried out on his production system).

I’m not going to make this a “how to do it” post as I posted an article about migrating from Exchange Server 5.5 to 2003 a couple of years back and one of the areas where the Exchange Server team have really excelled is in the creation of the Exchange Server Deployment Tools which guide an administrator through each step of the process, running diagnostic and setup utilities as they go. For further information, the Exchange Server Deployment Guide is also worth a read.

This article highlights simply some of the issues I came across (on what was a fairly simple migration – Outlook Web Access and Exchange Server 5.5 on two separate servers to a new Exchange Server 2003 server in the same organisation and site) and how to resolve them:

• The first problem came when Exchange Server setup detected that the installation was being performed on a Windows Server 2003 service pack 1 (SP1) computer (Windows Server 2003 R2 is effectively the same as Windows Server 2003 SP1) and advised that this has known compatibility issues with Exchange Server 2003. After reviewing the Exchange Server system requirements it turned out that it’s not a problem on a non-clustered server if Exchange Server is also running SP1 or later so Exchange Server service pack 2 (SP2) was installed immediately after Exchange Server setup had completed.
• The Active Directory Connector (ADC) is probably the most difficult part of an Exchange Server 5.5 upgrade but the latest version of ADC includes tools to guide an administrator through the process of creating connection agreements between the Active Directory and Exchange Server directory services and verifying replication. In this case, the ADC Tools highlighted an issue which meant it was necessary to grant Full Control NTFS permissions to the Exchange Server 5.5 service account on the C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Active Directory Connector folder (as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 820268). Further problems with objects reporting as not replicated (as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 842142) were resolved by reinstalling the ADC, using the version supplied with Exchange Server 2003 SP2.
• After installing Exchange Server 2003, one shutdown took an extended period of time; however this is a known issue, described in Microsoft knowledge base article 555025.
• One of the great features of Exchange Server has always been the referral mechanism that allows MAPI clients to update their profiles when a mailbox is moved between servers; however, on this occasion, some Outlook 2003 clients failed to update their MAPI profiles. This is a known issue and is resolved by installing Office 2003 SP2, as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 914855. No such problems were experienced with Outlook 2002 (XP) clients, although the site replication service (SRS) did hang on one occasion and needed to be started before clients could successfully remap their profiles.
• When accessing Outlook Web Access (OWA), requests to http://exchange2003servername/exchange/ appeared to be diverting to http://exchange55servername/exchange/; however it was later discovered that the referral was only taking place where the currently logged on user (domainname\Administrator in my case) had a mailbox that had not yet been migrated. Once all mailboxes had been moved across, OWA stopped redirecting access.
• Many Exchange Server 5.5 administrators are used to being able to access all objects (including the contents of other user’s mailboxes) using the Exchange Server service account; however with Exchange 2003, even when an account is delegated Exchange Full Administrator rights over the Exchange organisation it is unable to access other mailboxes as inherited permissions apply an explicit deny over certain rights. This is by design but can be overridden as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 821897 to give an account full access to all objects in a particular store. In this case I delegated Exchange Full Administrator rights to a global security group called Exchange Admins (and added that group into the local Administrators group on the Exchange server), then granted another account full control over all objects in the mailbox store. This mean that I had a group over which the membership could be edited as required to grant rights to administer the Exchange organisation, plus another account (I should really have made this a group too) that could view the contents of other user’s mailboxes.

In all, the migration was reasonably successful, although I do still need to decommission Exchange Server 5.5 (it was left in place to allow the Outlook profiles to update as users log in to the system) and some HTTPS publishing issues with Proxy Server 2.0 need to be resolved before I can call the job complete. In fact, those HTTPS publishing issues turned out to be the cause of much panic on Monday morning when Exchange seemed to be falling down around us. One of the methods we had tried to proxy inbound SSL was using the Winsock proxy client on the Exchange Server as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 184030. Although the SSL proxying hadn’t worked, the Winsock Proxy Client had been left installed on the Exchange Server – it didn’t seem to be causing any issues on Sunday night but by Monday morning the Exchange System Manager and Active Directory Users and Computers administration tools were inaccessible, which Microsoft knowledge base article 325322 suggests is related to a DNS problem. It was purely by chance that I managed to trace this back to the Winsock proxy client (as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 280833) and once this was uninstalled, all services became available.

One final issue left to resolve was to restore access to mailboxes for BlackBerry users, caused by the problems publishing OWA via HTTPS (although any change to the URL used to access OWA externally would have caused this). The resolution was to remove existing account details from users’ Vodafone Mobile E-mail profiles and recreate them using the new address as described in BlackBerry knowledge base article KB-03133.

Finally, for all Exchange Server admins, whether migrating to a new version of Exchange or administering an existing system, there are many tools for Exchange Server 2003 available for download from the Microsoft website.