My TOP 5 Exchange 2010 improvements

Several years ago when I attended training the instructed swore up and down that Microsoft would make a 32bit production version of Exchange 2007, I politely disagreed. I still smile inside not because she was wrong, but because Microsoft is getting better about ending support for old technologies.

  1. OWA: Full feature support for Firefox and Safari. I made a very public gripe about this in Remond Magazine a few years ago.
  2. Mail Federation between trusted companies, Shared free/busy calendars so its easier to schedule meetings with partners.
  3. Exchange 2010 is only supported on Windows Server 2008. Hooray for moving forward, Microsoft.
  4. Simplified High Availability: Fat trimmed and it now involves DAGs (Database Availability Groups). Essentially multiple servers.
  5. Archiving and Retention: Personal Archives that appear in the users mailbox with the ability to drag and drop PSTs into this archive!

Microsoft has also made many solid improvements in the storage engine, disk IO, and Client Access API. No gripes yet and I seriously doubt I’ll have any.