This week I am fortunate to be at MEC along with thousands of other people who are passionate about Exchange, and are looking to get the latest information on Exchange Server 2013.  

The event is at the Gaylord Palm Hotel in Orlando, and I have to say it is a spiffy place with coy carp, alligators and a really big salt water tank with lots of really nice big fish. 

I’m Looking forward to the advertised smorgasbord of fun treats!

• Get exclusive Exchange 15 content directly from the engineering team
• Get hands-on experience with Exchange 15
• Enjoy unparalleled access to Exchange team members, Masters and MVPs
• Preview amazing new products from select vendors
• Build personal relationships throughout the Exchange community

Cheers,

Rhoderick

If you are looking to see the first public presentations on Exchange 2013, then look no further!  Channel 9 has recordings from last week’s TechEd Australia.

You can find these great sessions on Exchange 2013:

Exchange Server 2013 High Availability and Site Resilience - EXL315

Exchange Server 2013 Architecture Deep Dive – EXL311

Exchange Server 2013 Deployment and Coexistence - EXL332

The New Exchange - Archiving and Compliance - EXL333

Still reading this?  What’s wrong with you? Go get your geek on!!!!

Cheers,

Rhoderick

If you leverage products from the Forefront family, then you will want to read about changes announced today on the Server & Cloud blog.

Today, as a result of our effort to better align security and protection solutions with the workloads and applications they protect, Microsoft is announcing changes to the roadmaps of some of the security solutions made available under the Forefront brand.

1. As part of this effort, the next release of Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, which has long been part of the Office 365 solution, will be named Exchange Online Protection. 
2. In response to customer demand, we are adding basic antimalware protection to Exchange Server 2013.  This protection can be easily turned off, replaced, or paired with other services (like Exchange Online Protection) to provide a layered defence. 
3. We are discontinuing any further releases of the following Forefront-branded solutions:

• Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (FPE)
• Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint (FPSP)
• Forefront Security for Office Communications Server (FSOCS)
• Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 (TMG)
• Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Protection Services (TMG WPS)

For collaboration protection, SharePoint and Lync Servers will continue to offer the built-in security capabilities that many customers use to protect shared documents.  For remote access, DirectAccess and Routing and Remote Access Server (RRAS) VPN in Windows Server 2012 provide secure remote access for Windows and cross-platform clients, as well as cross-premise access through site to site VPN. Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010 also continues to provide secure application publishing and cross-platform SSL VPN remote access for a range of mobile devices.
We will continue to provide maintenance and support for the following Forefront solutions through the standard Microsoft support lifecycle (see chart below), but the discontinued Forefront offerings will no longer be available for purchase as of Dec. 1, 2012.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

The beta release for System Center 2012 SP1 is now available for you to download and test in your lab environments.  This is an interesting release as it is adding support for Windows Server 2012.  In the case of SCVMM 2012 SP1, it means that it can only be installed on the RTM version of Windows Server 2012. 

At least I know what I’ll be doing this weekend now  

The Virtual Machine Manager server for the Beta release of System Center 2012 SP1 will only run on Windows Server 2012. For full prerequisites, see the document “Virtual Machine Manager in System Center 2012 Service Pack 1” at the following link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=254803..  (Note that at the time of posting the documents were still CTP, and not beta releases)

Prerequisites for Configuration Manager can be found at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=252950.

All other components now support Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 in addition to the operating systems that were supported in System Center 2012. For details on what was supported in System Center 2012, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=255218.

Cheers,

Rhoderick

Since the System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) Management Pack (MP) for Exchange 2010 has been re-released to the Microsoft download center, I thought that it would be worth bubbling this up.  The previous post can be found here on the blog.

This is build 14.03.0038.004 of the MP, and is dated August 31st 2012. 

The Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Management Pack includes a complete health model, extensive protocol synthetic transaction coverage, and a full complement of diagnostics-based alerts and service-oriented reporting, including mail flow statistics. Alerts are classified by impact and recovery action, and are now processed by a new component called the Correlation Engine. The Correlation Engine suppresses duplicate alerts whenever possible to help front-line monitoring technicians monitor Exchange more efficiently. Most diagnostic information used in the Exchange 2010 Management Pack, including events and performance counters, is specifically engineered for monitoring. Very little tuning is required to monitor your Exchange organization. The Exchange 2010 Management Pack will scale with your environment.

Cheers,

Rhoderick