Exchange 2007 Top Ten (Part 2)

Ok part 2 with the top 5 - Part 1 is here

5 Powershell

After years of using GUIs to carry out my daily tasks I must admit I was a bit sceptical about going back to a shell to administer Exchange. My main concerns were born from the days in support where awful mistakes had been made using scripts resulting in chaos.

But when I actually started using Powershell I was really pleasantly surprised. The more I play with it and understand the power of it the more I love it.

4 OVA

Outlook Voice Access - say no more, the ability to access our inbox/calendar/contacts and directory via Voice - Just awesome

3 DOC ACCESS

I absolutely love this - the amount of times I have been sent a link to a document on a sharepoint site or file server while I have no access because I am out of the office and picking up mail via OWA. Basically rendering the communication useless.

Not any longer - Check out this screenshot

 See the Documents circled in red. When you click on this it will take you to

 I have circled "Open Location" which will allow you to add shares or sharepoint sites

I have shared the Exchange 2007 install files just as an example. But I think you can get the idea.

I guess you are all asking - great but if I access OWA from and internet cafe they may not have powerpoint installed so how can I view that document. Well with Webready document viewing we convert the document to Html and present it that way.

I will blog more on this great feature soon

2 LCR CCR

Local Continuous Replication and Cluster Continuous Replication. I blogged on CCR earlier.

In a nutshell this is log shipping either in to a separate phyisical disk system CCR or to a separate disk system in the same server LCR. The main difference from previous clustering in exchange is that the databases are no longer shared between nodes.

This allows for better resiliency as in theory you will always have a separate up to date copy of the database. This also allows for backups to be taken against the copy that the users are not connected to hence allowing for bigger backup windows.

1 UM - Unified Messaging

Finally my number one feature of Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging. Why do I like this so much. Simple I spend most of my day in Outlook hence I want everything to be sent to Outlook. Unified Messaging allows this.

Voicemail, Email Faxes all come to my inbox, so Ino longer have to worry about checking multiple systems for my communications I just check Outlook.

For those of you that have not seen  how a voice mail will look in Outlook 2007 here you go

Notice the Audio Notes text box - no more scrabbling for a pen and paper and the play on phone. The ability to give any number to redirect the message to.

So thats it my top 10. If you think I have missed any features let me know

To find out more on all thr above and more go here