This one is for my buddy Seth who waited for months for the message limits to be lifted. For those of you interested, here is where they are changed in SP1:

Organization Configuration > Hub Transport > Global Settings > Transport Settings:

Wham, bam, ticket closed.

Over at You Had Me At EHLO, Cathy has published the updated documentation links for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1. There is a lot of new stuff coming, and the new features address pretty much all the issues that clients have raised and will let us roll out Exchange 2007 where we previously faced resistance or felt we ought to hold off on an upgrade.

Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 Documentation

I got to spend a lot of time at TechEd with Cathy and with a few folks from the documentation team, they have really outdone themselves when it comes to documenting this product.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 beta is now available, check out the release notes first.

Lot’s of new stuff coming to Exchange 2007:

• Personal distribution lists that users can create and manage themselves via Outlook Web Access
• Ability to edit Server Side rules through Outlook Web Access
• Deleted item recovery
• Office 2007 document converter so you can see those docs on the web
• S/MIME
• and Public folders

Yes… public folders… yes.. SP1… Yes, 2007… No, I’m not kidding.

So aside from that little bit of shame, Susan Bradley is singlehandedly killing my ability to sell Exchange 2007. I’ve had two partners today decline their new mailboxes on Exchange 2007 and opted to go with 2003. In both scenarios they said:“I don’t want any surprises”

I just got some very exciting news from my MVP lead — it appears that now that Exchange 12 is available to a solid amount of people in the Beta form I can talk about it — and show it — at length. I'll be meeting a ton of my fellow Exchange MVP's in about two weeks at Orlando Exchange Connections and will formulate my approach with their assistance. I am very excited, specifically because nobody talks or shows Exchange. Pardon me, but your IQ must be really low to get a thril out of a 3D notepad with alpha transparent title bar. Show me something that is actually used by kids that aren't 12! I will give you a hint: "Vlad, yea!"

WARNING: This is my initial plunge into E12 Beta 1. This is not a final product, this is not a review of E12 and all of this is a lie. While pretty much everyone is out getting drunk, yours truly, the Exchange MVP remained home on a Friday afternoon working on the internal E12 deployment. Oooooh my god is this thing f'n awesome. For the first deployment I wanted to be as close to what an average "Exchange" system administrator does so I plowed through the install program without reading any documentation, release notes or prompts it threw back at me. I just kept on hitting next and OK to install. While this is not a very true representation of an average environment Exchange admins have (in that my Active Directory was properly configured and stable) I think I have gone far enough to the point of even getting into OWA. I have to say (sip of Koolade) that the Exchange 12 team did an incredible job. I say this with absolutely no sarcasm implied or intended: Illiterate and semi-literate admins will only be able to hurt themselves. By default Beta1 does not create any connectors or bindings whatsoever. In order to recieve email you have to drop to the new Exchange Management Shell (cute name for Monad/MSH) and create it by yourself. Documentation is awesome. Not only does it link back and forth in a relevant way but it also includes code examples, snippets, ability to search and send feedback. As for the features… wow. I am not allowed to comment on specific stuff due to the beta and the NDA but suffice to say it looks unreal. The marketing is interesting too, it ties into the new scheme you may see on live.com or Windows Mobile or at least that is my impression.

Looks like the Exchange camp is getting ready for a public assault with E12. First, the news that E12 will be shipping to the Technet / MSDN crowd. But if you're not there yet (and ready to sacrifice a mail server) the CTP is discussed on this podcast. So thats enough Exchange to keep your weekend busy, isn't it? What's more, you'll be able to say more about it than I'm allowed to due to Microsoft/MVP/NDA/Koolade I'm under. I must stress, yet again, despite what you've heard, despite what you read, despite what you see in the Technet/MSDN downloads or elsewhere — There will be no 32bit production version of Exchange 12.

This is an update for all of you that attended last weeks Gulf Coast Partner Technight presented by Rene Alamo and James Cuomo. Conversation about the availability of 32bit E12 had many speculations so let me clear up a few details. Exchange 12 (codename E12) will be 64bit only. Longhorn Server will not have full functionality on current 64bit motherboards. Some functionality will require hardware support on-board which is currently not available. Exchange 12 (codename E12) will have a 32bit release point for testing/evaluation purposes, it will NOT be a supported platform in the production environment. SBS Cougar (or 2007) will be a 64bit only platform. So there you go, that is all the clarity I can provide at this point.

Terry Myerson of the Exchange team finally comes out and talks about the "de-emphasizing" of the Public Folders in the Exchange releases after E12. What is particularly insighftul is the comment by Paul Robichaux, fellow Exchange MVP:

Given that PFs will be officially supported until at least 2016, I think it's a safe bet that the SharePoint folks will provide a distributed multi-master replication facility sometime before PFs fade off into the sunset. My experience has generally been that many of the organizations now using PFs have lots of PF content that they don't need and aren't using, so PF cleanup is always one of the first things included in any supportability review I perform for customers.- Paul Robichaux, MVP

Remember that this will not be a shotgun implementation with your Public folders disappearing overnight. Microsoft has a 10 year support on its server products, which means should E12 ship this year you will have 100% functionality in your Exchange Public Folder infrastructure through 2016. Do you REALLY plan your mail strategy that far in advance? Really? Do you? In 2016 I expect my Exchange server to read my mind, write my emails, strip out any profanities and make me more coherent than my thoughts. I also want it to have an ass-detector of the person that I am thinking my message to - so if they are cool it automatically inserts a snide remark, like the following quote from an unnamed MVP:

No. "De-emphasized". Used in a sentence: "I de-emphasized him with a brick".

Unify THAT Exchange.

Okay, so I am out and about on the road up in DC but this didn't fall off the radar - Exchange team finally put out a press release announcing the features that will be included in E12. The good news is that they released all the features they promised at Barcelona IT summit a few months ago. I blogged about that event and even had some video on the demonstration of the new Outlook Voice Access and unified messaging. The bad news is that this press release comes short of everything coming with E12. I don't blame them, they are just PR monkeys that rephrase someone elses ideas but if you read the press release you'd be hard pressed to find anything that we do not have today or have been promised for a long time. More up-to-date IMF, stable antivirus API, bigger mail store, accessibility via mobile and secure mobile management, attachment filtering. All things you have (or should have) implemented already. The two lines that I find the most important are:

- A unified messaging system delivers voice mail and faxes to the Exchange inbox where, like e-mail, they can be accessed by Outlook, Outlook Web Access, mobile devices, and any phone through Outlook Voice Access with speech recognition. - A scriptable, command line shell saves IT administrators countless hours by allowing routine and repetitive tasks to be automated. Based on Windows® “Monad,” the code name for the next version of the Windows command shell, it includes capabilities above and beyond the Exchange System Manager.

Why are those interesting? Well for one they start the convergence of Outlook as the default communications medium. Currently Outlook "relies" on other hooks into LCS, MSN Messenger, etc to extend its functionality. Those "hooks" or plugins make Outlook slow and in some third-party add ons introduce instability. Providing these as a core offering will mean easier administration, easier management and security, and more flexible platform for collaboration. E12 is a long away from now… but if you are on a 10 year server plan, what do you do to get ready today? Order a DVD-R with your server and make sure its 64bit. Everything else can be figured out later and spend the extra $$$ on ram if you'd like to figure it out fast. P.S. Please stop emailing me asking for a copy of E12 beta.