Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta Nearly Ready

Published: February 28, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft's Exchange Server team is putting the finishing touches on the beta of Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which will add, among other things, support for the next release of Windows Server, codenamed "Longhorn."

According to a post on the Exchange Server Team Blog! (which also goes by the endearing title "You Had Me At EHLO"), work on SP1 is almost done. "We're wrapping up our Beta of Exchange 2007 SP1 (to be released through TechNet Plus this April), and as always we wanted to discuss it publicly here first," wrote Terry Myerson, general manager of the Exchange Server product group, in a blog posting on Friday. "We are targeting the final release with Longhorn Server in the second half of this year."

This will be welcome news to customers who are looking to deploy Microsoft's flagship e-mail server with the next release of Windows Server. The lack of support for Longhorn with Exchange Server 2007 was inconvenient for some customers, who were forced to use an older version, Exchange Server 2003 SP1, against the Longhorn beta to see how the new Microsoft operating system fared with e-mail workloads.

Exchange Server 2007 shipped in December. It's the first version of Exchange to be offered in 64-bit only.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 will bring other goodies, most notably a new feature called Standby Continuous Replication (SCR). With Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft introduced a feature called Clustered Continuous Replication (CCR), which enables replication of data between two servers within a cluster within the same datacenter, according to Myerson.

"With SCR, it replicates to a non-clustered server in a remote datacenter. If the primary datacenter becomes unavailable, the standby replica in the second datacenter is readily available to be activated," he says.

Outlook Web Access (OWA) will also benefit with Exchange Server 2007 SP1 through an array of new features, including personal distribution lists, support for S/MIME encryption, support for rules, a new monthly calendar view, the capability to recover deleted items, and access to public folders. SP1 will also bring spell checking Arabic and Korean, and will add support for viewing Office 2007 file formats as HTML.

The new release will also bring enhancements to the Exchange Management Console, including support for public folder configuration, support for POP and IMAP account configuration, support for "SendAs permission" configuration, and new delegation wizard scenarios.

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