What's coming in Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1
It wasn't all that long ago (October 2009) that Microsoft released to manufacturing its Exchange Server 2010 product. Yet on April 7, company officials started talking about what's coming in the first service pack (SP) for the product, via the Exchange Server Team blog.
In a post entitled "Yes Virginia, there is an Exchange Server 2010 SP1," the team shared information on some of the features -- beyond the expected fixes and "roll-up of the roll-ups released to date -- that are coming with the SP1 update. The team also committed to providing the final version of Exchange Server 2010 SP1 before the end of calendar 2010, and said to expect a beta of SP1 in June, around the time of the TechEd 2010 North America conference.
New features/functionality on tap for Exchange Server 2010 SP1 include archiving and discovery updates, Outlook Web App improvements, mobile user and management improvements and "some highly sought after additional UI for management tasks," the Exchange team said.
On the archive/discovery front, SP1 will add the capability to provision a user's Personal Archive to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox. There also will be an update for support for access to a user's Personal Archive with Outlook 2007. Via SP1, users also will be able to import historical e-mail data from .PST files directly into Exchange. The Exchange Management Console will be getting new tools for creating Retention Policy Tags. And the Multi-Mailbox Search feature will get updates to help with e-discovery of e-mail "for legal, regulatory or other reasons," according to the Softies.
On the Outlook Web App front, SP1 will get a faster reading experience, as a result of enhancements for pre-fetching message content, according to the blog post, as well as other UI-related updates that will make OWA "much friendlier to the smaller screens of ever popular Netbooks." Additionally, users will be able to share calendars with anonymous viewers via the Web (if admins enable this functionality), the team said.
There are other information-rights-management and console improvements detailed in the full post on the team blog.