Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Goes RTM

Published: December 5, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft last week announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1), signaling its immediate availability to existing Exchange 2007 customers. The new release includes enhancements that will appeal to customers planning deployments of Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, or Office Communication Server 2007, while other features should make the release interesting for additional customers, including those with large mail stores or users of Outlook Web Access (OWA).

Microsoft launched Exchange Server 2007--the first release of the e-mail server to be available only in 64 bits--about a year ago, and the first service pack has been in beta tests for most of that time. Last week, news of the RTM of SP1 was dispensed from the Exchange Server team blog, which applauded the work of the Technology Adoption Program (TAP).

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 supports Windows Server 2008 (it also works with Windows Server 2003 SP2) and Windows Vista clients. It also enables the delivery of faxes and voicemail to Outlook e-mail boxes through Office Communicator 2007, the client component of Office Communication Server 2007.

The new release should also bring better availability with a new feature called Standby Continuous Replication (SCR), which is designed to replicate mailbox data to a standby server so a natural disaster doesn't take out e-mail.

SCR is a twist on a feature Microsoft introduced with the first release of Exchange Server 2007, called Clustered Continuous Replication (CCR), which enables replication of data between two servers within a cluster within the same datacenter. With SCR, the Exchange store can be replicated to a non-clustered server in a remote datacenter. The advantage is that, if the primary datacenter becomes unavailable, the standby replica in the second datacenter can be activated.

SP1 also brings better support for OWA, including support for 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.

Enhancements to the Exchange Management Console will bring support for public folder configuration, bulk creation of mailboxes, support for POP and IMAP account configuration, support for "SendAs permission" configuration, and new delegation wizard scenarios.

One beta tester, Hewlett-Packard, found SP1 to be a "significant step forward for Exchange," according to Stan Foster of the HP Technology Solutions Group, as quoted in the Exchange Team Blog. Foster hailed the performance, stability, and scalability of SP1, and says the new software allowed HP to consolidate more than 260,000 mailboxes served from more than 100 locations down to three, and to reduce the number of Exchange servers by two-thirds.

Microsoft is also releasing (or very close to releasing) Forefront Security for Exchange Server SP1, a version of its security software designed specifically for Exchange Server 2007 SP1. This release will bring content filtering in 11 languages, better integration with Systems Center Operations Manager, and a better means of blocking highly compressed ZIP files that have malware in them.

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Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 2 Gets Tech Preview

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta Nearly Ready

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