Companies of all sizes are turning toward mobile devices as a way to help their employees work more effectively and productively. The Microsoft Exchange Server product family includes integrated support for a wide range of mobile devices, providing Exchange customers with a low-cost, easy-to-manage mobile messaging solution as part of their Exchange deployments.

 

Shortly after the release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, the newest version of Windows Mobile – Windows Mobile 6 was released. Formerly codenamed Crossbow, this release contains a number of enterprise ready features designed to work natively with Exchange Server 2007 to provide a robust mobile experience. We have a blog post providing an overview of the features available when using Exchange 2007 and Windows Mobile 6.0.  Check it out here for more details.

 

A new feature of Exchange Server 2007 that helps prevent the inundation of system resources of an Exchange Server 2007 transport server is back pressure.

Back pressure is a system resource monitoring feature of the Exchange Transport service that exists on computers that are running Exchange Server 2007 that have the Hub Transport server role or Edge Transport server role installed.

When a monitored system resource, such has hard disk drive utilization or memory utilization, exceeds the specified threshold, the Exchange transport server stops accepting new connections and messages, and concentrates on delivering existing messages. This prevents the system resources from being completely overwhelmed and enables the Exchange server to deliver the existing messages. When the utilization of the monitored system resources returns to normal levels, the Exchange transport server accepts new connections and messages.

For each monitored system resource on a Hub Transport server or Edge Transport server, the three levels (Normal, Medium and High) of resource utilization are applied.

For example, by default, the message queue database is stored at <drive letter>:\Program Files\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\TransportRoles\data\Queue. By default, the high level of hard disk drive space utilization is calculated by using the following formula: 100*(hard disk drive size - 4 GB) / hard disk drive size. As the available free hard disk drive space decreases, the hard disk drive utilization increases. So, we require at least 4GB free space on the hard disk drive containing message queue database. Otherwise, the hard disk drive space utilization will reach the high level and Exchange stops accepting any new connections and messages.

People who are not aware of this new back pressure feature can be surprised when they find that the mail flow stops their servers.

For more information about and better understanding the back pressure feature, please view the Microsoft TechNet article at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201658.aspx

 

Recently, we have been seeing a number of issues where public folders cannot be replicated to Exchange 2007. The symptoms are:

1.       Exchange 2007 Mailboxes are not able to view Exchange 2003 Public Folders through Outlook client.

2.       On Exchange 2003 Server, the public folder replication messages are queued in the Messages with an unreachable destination queue.

3.       On Exchange 2003 Server, you may find event below:

Event Type:    Warning

Event Source:         MSExchangeTransport

Event Category:     Routing Engine/Service

Event ID:          951

Description:

When sending mail to the following address exchange2007name.domain.com.5B2DCAE3-0882-1148-8DEB-B36F641F9E2B, we have found the connector with target domain *.5B2DCAE3-0882-1148-8DEB-B36F641F9E2B matching destination address exists in DS. However, we have no way of getting there. You need to check your topology and add appropriate connectors among Routing Groups.

 

The root cause is that there is no Routing Group Connector between Exchange 2003 RG and Exchange 2007 RG. During Exchange 2007 installation, there is an option to select an Exchange 2000/2003 Routing Group Connector Bridge Head Server. If you do not configure this option, the Routing Group Connector won’t be created between the default routing group in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2003 routing groups.

 

Note: The first routing group connector between Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2000 is created and configured during installation of the first Hub Transport Server role in an existing Exchange organization.

 

To resolve this issue, you can use the Exchange Management Shell to manually create the routing group connector.

For example, run the following command to create reciprocal routing group connectors between the Exchange 2007 routing group and the routing group that is associated with the specified Exchange Server 2003 server, assign a cost of 100 to that connector, and enable public folder referrals:

 

New-RoutingGroupConnector -Name "Interop RGC" -SourceTransportServers "Ex2007Hub1.contoso.com" -TargetTransportServers "Ex2003BH1.contoso.com" -Cost 100 -Bidirectional $true -PublicFolderReferralsEnabled $true

 

When you try to uninstall Exchange 2007 from your server, you may receive some error messages which indicate that there is still some Public Folder on the machine thus meaning the uninstall process fails. We have received a lot of these issues recently. It is caused by the Exchange 2007 server containing some public folder replicas. We should remove the replicas as well as the public folder store before we can uninstall Exchange 2007 properly.

For the detailed steps to remove public folder replicas and the public folder store, please refer to the following article.

How to remove Exchange 2007 from a computer

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;927464

 

Exchange 2007 SP1 will be released in the second half of this year. A partial list of what you'll find included in this SP is:

Standby Continuous Replication (SCR)

With Exchange 2007, we introduced Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) for replication of data between 2 servers within a cluster.  With SCR, data can be replicated on a per-storage group basis to standby servers or clusters.  The SCR target, whether a single mailbox server or a cluster, can be placed inside the primary datacenter or in a remote location, ready to be manually activated if the primary server or datacenter fails.

OWA

SP1 will fill in the feature holes that we just didn't have time to complete by RTM:

• Personal distribution lists
• S/MIME
• Rules
• Monthly calendar view
• Deleted items recovery
• Public folder access

OWA 2007 SP1 spell checking will add support for:

• Arabic
• Korean

OWA 2007 SP1 will add support for viewing Office 2007 file formats as HTML.

Exchange Management Console

SP1 will fill in the GUI holes that we just didn't have time to complete by RTM, including:

• Public folder configuration
• POP and IMAP configuration
• SendAs permission configuration
• Delegation wizard scenarios

Web Services

New web service coverage will include:

• Public folder access 
• Delegate management
• Folder permission management

IPv6

On Longhorn Server, we will support Exchange 2007 on native IPv6 networks.

 

Move Mailbox

This vital tool administrator tool has been beefed up to include import and export to a .pst