The TechNet Australia Blog : Exchange

TechEd Europe Keynote Recap

Deeps — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:46:59 GMT

Stephen Elop closed out day 1 of TechEd Europe with the announcement of General Availability of Exchange 2010. In the keynote, he talked about some of the new features in 2010, like the new protection and management capabilities.
He also talked about Cloud Computing, and how we're putting the choice in the hands of IT Pros - you can decide which parts, and how much of your environment you want to move to the cloud.
The Windows Server team also showed off some of the stuff they're doing around management and provisioning - really good stuff!

Exchange Server 2010 is now available

Deeps — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:53:52 GMT

Information from the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog:

It is my distinct pleasure to announce today the global availability of Exchange Server 2010. This has been an amazing journey from conception to launch, and the team has delivered an unprecedented line up of innovations in this release. I am incredibly proud of the team and our product.

The dedication of the Exchange community working side by side with us to deliver Exchange 2010 has been inspiring for me. I want to thank you for your commitment over the past 3 years helping us develop new ideas, make product enhancements and test pre-release bits to ensure our final product is rock solid. I believe Exchange has the most impressive IT Pro and Developer community in the world today. We could not have shipped this product without you!

In return, I hope you realize the full value of everything Exchange 2010 offers. We are all working in a very challenging economic environment today. Being cost conscious has never been more important - but also helping your organizations differentiate themselves and compete effectively is just as critical. I am delighted to see how Exchange 2010 is helping early adopters accomplish these goals. I want to share just a sampling of their stories, so you can see for yourself.

Organizations are cutting costs and simplifying administration with Exchange 2010.

"Performance with large mailboxes greatly exceeds our expectations. With the growing amount of data that needs to be retained, it is not uncommon for us to have 30-gigabyte plus mailboxes, making these performance improvements crucial to our business. I have been using Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 for e-mail since June and have been extremely satisfied with the performance and the user experience. It is a robust, very stable platform. And, we found RBAC to be a huge benefit. That is something I have needed for a long time-to have more granular rights for administrators and lower-level IT staff to do targeted tasks." - Alexander Diaz, CIO, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP

"The cost savings from switching from fiber channel to SATA disks is about 70 percent. The I/O system of Exchange Server 2010 is really optimized. If you look at Exchange Server 2007, it's good; but Exchange Server 2010 is really great. You can significantly reduce the disk costs when you run Exchange Server 2010." - Thomas Keck, CIO, Elabs

"We're always moving users around. We've been doing that with custom scripts in Exchange Server 2003, but we will definitely be using the Online Move Mailbox feature in 2010. Now we can move them without taking the mailbox offline." - Allan Tagg, SVP, Global Messaging Exec, Bank of America

Organizations are improving everyday productivity and meeting the expectations of a new generation of workers with Exchange 2010.

"Our salespeople need to respond quickly to dealer concerns. With Exchange Server 2010 and voice-to-text conversion, within 20 seconds after a dealer leaves a voice-mail message, our users see an e-mail preview on their cell phone. Our mobile employees might check voice mail anywhere from 5 to 10 times a day, at 5 to 10 minutes a session. By using Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and taking advantage of the voice-mail preview feature in Exchange Server 2010, they can increase their responsiveness while saving more than 15 minutes a day. From a business perspective, that's an incredibly valuable productivity increase." - George Hamin, Director of E-Business and Information Systems, Subaru Canada

"Having Conversation View on the new mobile client is really nice. It provides an extremely fast and efficient means of surveying my inbox and taking needed actions on the go." - Steven Schafer, Director of Collaboration and Network Services, Global Crossing

"By taking advantage of Outlook Web App, employees can start being productive from new locations almost immediately. As soon as they get their workstation and network connectivity, administrators can quickly provide them with access to e-mail and IM at a moment's notice without having to manage a lot of logistics. That's tremendous. Just simplifying the process of giving our remote employees access to e-mail and IM with Exchange Server 2010 will increase the productivity of our IT administrators by at least 20 to 30 percent." - Dan Evans, Manager of Messaging and Collaboration, Morgan Keegan & Company

Organizations of all sizes are better managing risk and the cost of compliance with Exchange 2010.

"With Exchange Server 2010, we can give the auditors permission to pull mail out of mailboxes themselves, rather than having me pull the data and ship it to them in a PST file. Now the nine hours a month I spend on compliance will be cut down to zero. Getting rid of PST files using Exchange Server 2010 solves a whole series of nightmares that I'm sure every Exchange Server administrator has had" - Andrew McNair, Wintel Infrastructure Manager, Cell C

"By using the compliance features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, we can save about $400,000 in hardware and software costs. That's a big savings." - Joseph Nguyen, Systems Architect at a large U.S. university.

"With Exchange Server 2010, we can set up transport protection rules for things like social security numbers to comply with HIPAA and for voice mails to ensure that they can't be forwarded outside the company." - Thomas Dechmann, Senior Principal IT Technologist, Medtronic

I'm also particularly proud of the work the team has done delivering Exchange as a server and a service. This has been an incredible engineering endeavor that no one else in the industry comes close to delivering. Today, we've successfully scaled Exchange 2010 to more than 15 million Outlook Live accounts around the world and, moving forward, to millions more with Exchange Online. Our promise to deliver a seamless Exchange experience on premises with the server, in the cloud as a service or a combination of the two truly gives customers choice and peace of mind.

You can see more customer results from the case studies published today, read about the launch in press coverage, hear from MBD President Stephen Elop in his TechEd Europe keynote launching Exchange 2010 and this evening at the Exchange Connections conference in Las Vegas in my keynote.

I know many of you are already underway with your Exchange 2010 deployments and many more will be starting today. The Exchange Server 2010 bits are available for download now. As always, keep the feedback coming. Listening to customers and partners is how the team has made Exchange the premier e-mail solution across the globe and that's the way we intend to keep it.

Thank you!

- Rajesh Jha

Live Meeting – Exchange 2010 The Future of Collaboration

Deeps — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:49:00 GMT

Event Overview
The upcoming release of Exchange 2010 can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange 2010 delivers the best end-user experience, the widest range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities, that combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available. Learn more about it in this Live Meeting session.

Exchange 2010: The Future of Collaboration
Language(s): English.
Product(s): Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.
Audience(s): IT Manager,IT Professional.
Duration: 90 Minutes
Start Date: Friday, June 19, 2009 11:00 AM Australia (East)

Speaker Details
Johann Kruse is a National Technology Specialist for Microsoft Australia, based in Sydney. Johann’s areas of speciality include Unified Communications, VoIP, Exchange Server and Office Communications Server. Johann works with enterprise and government customers assisting with the development and design of messaging and Unified Communications platforms and strategies.

Johann has a UC blog at http://blogs.technet.com/jkruse and you can usually find out what’s he doing at http://twitter.com/whassaname

Click here to Register

Get your hands on Exchange 2010 Beta today

Deeps — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:54:11 GMT

Exchange 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products and is the first server in a new generation of Microsoft server technology built from the ground up to work on-premises and as an online service. This release of Exchange 2010 introduces a new integrated e-mail archive and features to help reduce costs and improve the user experience. A public beta of the server is available for download starting today at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/exchange/2010/default.aspx.

Exchange Server 2010 will become available in the second half of 2009. Microsoft Office 2010 and related products will enter technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and become available in the first half of 2010.

TechNet Edge - Announcing Exchange 2010 Beta

TechNet Edge - What's new in Unified Messaging in Exchange 2010?

Exchange 2010 will help organizations reduce costs, protect communications and delight e-mail users with capabilities to do the following:

Lower costs with more flexible deployment and management options. Exchange 2010 provides organizations with the same enterprise-grade capabilities whether deployed on-premises or as a service from Microsoft or partners — or as a mix of both. Further, for customers deploying the server, the new release simplifies the way organizations provide always-on communications and disaster recovery, meaning administrators spend less time managing their e-mail system. Exchange 2010 further improves performance running on lower-cost direct-attached storage, enabling organizations to dramatically reduce storage costs by up to 85 percent without sacrificing performance or reliability.
Protect information and meet compliance requirements with the new e-mail archive. As e-mail volume grows, companies must address increasing compliance, legal and e-discovery concerns, but today, according to Osterman Research, only 28 percent of organizations currently archive their e-mail content (Osterman Research, 2008). Exchange 2010 introduces an integrated e-mail archive. The new solution makes it easier to store and query e-mail across the organization using the Exchange software that organizations already know and use.
Improve user productivity with the ultimate inbox experience. Basex Inc. recently estimated that the average number of corporate e-mail messages received per person per day is expected to reach more than 93 by 2010. In addition, businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary interruptions including those from e-mail (Basex, 2008). Exchange 2010, together with Microsoft Outlook 2010, will give people more control over their communications with features such as these:

MailTips. Warn users before they commit an e-mail faux pas such as sending mail to large distribution groups, to recipients who are out of the office or to recipients outside the organization, helping protect against information leaks and reduce unnecessary e-mail messages.
Voice Mail Preview. See text previews of voice mail directly in Outlook.
Ignore Conversation. This e-mail “mute button” allows people to remove themselves from an irrelevant e-mail string, reducing unwanted e-mail and runaway reply-all threads.
Conversation View. Combine related e-mail messages in a single conversation to reduce inbox clutter.
Call Answering Rules. Create customized “Press 1 for …” call-routing menus with Exchange voice mail.
Consistent Experience. Use Outlook on the PC, a mobile phone or a browser for the same experience with enhancements in Outlook Mobile and Outlook Web Access.

Microsoft Australia Unified Comms Tech Specialist - Johann Kruse

Deeps — Wed, 30 May 2007 04:11:00 GMT

You may have seen Johann at some of our recent Microsoft events. He is a keen advocate around our Unified Communications Technology. He is a National Technology Specialist in the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft Australia. Johann's areas of speciality include Exchange Server, Office Communications Server, Live Communications Server, VoIP and Video over IP. He works with Enterprise and Government customers assisting with the development and design of Unified Communications and messaging platforms and strategies.

Prior to joining Microsoft Johann was the Network Manager at ninemsn where he was responsible for the design, deployment and strategic planning of network infrastructure and security services, as well as engineering and development of the IP network.

He is also known as Mohann during the month of Movember and he plays Rugby for Waverly Rugby Club.

So keep up to date with whats happening around Unified Communications Technology from Microsoft at Johann's Blog http://blogs.technet.com/jkruse/

Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino released

Deeps — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:03:00 GMT

If your organisation is looking to move from IBM's Lotus Domino colloboration server to Exchange 2007 then the new Transporter Suite is for you. Transporter Suite configures Directory and Free/Busy interoperability between Lotus Domino 6 or 7 and Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and migration of users, mail and applications from Lotus Domino 5, 6 or 7 to Active Directory, Exchange Server 2007, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
Download here