Most of you probably have heard about Exchange 2010 SP1 beta being made available a while ago. If you haven't, here is the link, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a0965fc9-2723-4947-ae6b-74bc3808e72a&displaylang=en

Why is this important? It is important especially to those who are running current HMC Hosted Exchange because Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting model will replace the existing Exchange hosting in HMC. Now, we also get a beta help file for Exchange Hosting Deployment too. To the help file, hit the link here, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?familyId=bba88fb5-9d84-475c-85d7-3ffeb308636e&displayLang=en

Obviously, this is a beta Help file, some of the portions are still not available but it should give you a good idea what cmdlets are available for hosters and how you should design your next control panel be. Also, it will give you an idea what are the components that are currently available in HMC as a solution such as resource management but will not be part of this Exchange 2010 SP1.

Here is a summary of what is available in this help file,

  1. Autodiscover redirection is quite similar to what we are doing in HMC currently.
  2. The concept of Service Plan and Mailbox Plan is now built into Exchange 2010 SP1.
  3. The concept of hosting multiple organizations in one Exchange environment is also built into Exchange 2010 SP1. No longer you need to do all kind of funky stuff as in HMC to cater for that. There are quite a few cmdlets made available and there will probably be more when the SP1 goes RTM (bear in mind these are just pre-release documentations).
    1. Remove-LinkedUser
    2. Get-Organization
    3. New-Organization
    4. Start-OrganizationUpgrade
    5. Complete-OrganizationUpgrade
    6. Get-RecipientEnforcementProvisioningPolicy
    7. New-RecipientEnforcementProvisioningPolicy
    8. Remove-RecipientEnforcementProvisioningPolicy
    9. Set-RecipientEnforcementProvisioningPolicy
    10. Update-ServicePlan

I will go into this a little bit more as we go, providing more information on where the Organization or Service Plan information is stored and etc. etc. In the meanwhile, get excited. :)