Chad Hardin: What?s new in Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2

Monday, June 6, 2011

What?s new in Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2

In the second half of this year Exchange 2010 SP2 will be released, this will not only include bug fixes but also new features. It will also requires a schema update.

There are about 500 bugfixes currently planned to be fixed in this SP. Nice fact Exchange contains 20 million lines of code in C, C# and other languages.

The new features are:

OWA mini,

Hybrid Configuration wizard

Address Book Policy

OWA auto site redirection

OWA mini

OMA is back Smile , it is a browser based HTML mailbox access for mobile devices.

Why? Some countries like Japan users prefer browser based access on their mobile devices.

It is based on OWA, in affect it is a view of OWA

OWA mini inherits OWA settings and policies, so if Calendar access is restricted in OWA it is also in OWA mini.

OWA mini includes access to tasks

As it is based on OWA, Active Sync policies are not relevant

All OWA languages are also available for OWA mini

URL looks like https://mail.company.com/owa/oma This may change though when release gets closer.

Hybrid Configuration wizard

Designed to ease up co existence between Exchange on premise and Office 356, this is currently not much fun. This wizard reduces steps needed from 49 to 6

Address Book Policy

By default in Exchange, the GAL contains every mail enabled object

Gal segmentation means dividing up the GAL and Address Lists

Address Book policy is a feature that replaces the GAL segmentation, this was not a feature but a white paper with steps to take. This segmentation method does not work in 2010, infact it may break your AD.

Why?

Legal or compliance reasons
Optimization, split huge GAL in to smaller logical units
Hosting: multiple org on 1 platform

Address Book Policy (ABP)= directly assigns an address lists to a user

For ABP Exchange 2010 SP2 required is on CAS and it works only for mailboxes hosted on 2010

When ABP is impacted

Open address lists picker
Search the GAL
Resolve name or alias
Add rooms
Search directory from Outlook Voice Access
Query directory from mobile device

View DL memberships, you only see members you are allowed to see, meaning the mailtips maybe lying Surprised smile

Custom attributes is the best way to scope address lists, company does not work because than you miss Distribution lists

Building Offline address books based on custom GAL now actually works with SP2, currently you can select a custom GAL, but it will actually use the default GAL.

Know this about ABP:

ABP does not legally separate users
ABP is not designed for Hosted Exchange, this scenario should use /Hosting Exchange installation
LDAP queries will bypass ABP
ECP uses get-group and not get-distribution group and so ignores ABPs
Don't mix ABP with ACL

Sorry for the pic quality, click for larger view

OWA auto site redirection

My laptop battery went flat when this topic was discussed so the name may be different.

Currently when logon to Outlook Web Access, but your mailbox is hosted on a mailbox server in another Active Directory site, you will be presented with an message telling you you need to connect to OWA over another URL ?for best performance? When you click on it you need to logon again. Not so nice experience.

With this feature this redirection is automated Party smile