Microsoft released the first service pack for Exchange Server 2007 on Thursday,
fixing software bugs and adding some new features to make the product more stable
and useful for business customers. However, Microsoft's Exchange partners said
there are still improvements that could be made so the latest version of Exchange
can provide customers with a more complete end-to-end messaging architecture.

Users can download Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) from Microsoft's
Web site. Anticipating
the long-awaited release of Windows Server 2008 early next year, Microsoft added
support for that product into SP1, as well as features that allow for integration
between Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007.

Windows Server 2008 support in particular is important for customers, because
there is clustering technology in Windows Server 2008 that replaces existing
technology in Windows Server 2000 and 2003 that has become obsolete, said Keith
McCall, chief technology officer and founder of Azaleos in Seattle. Azaleos
offers an Exchange hardware appliance and other e-mail management and archiving
services.

Windows Server 2008 support in SP1 provides Exchange customers with "a
more effective high-availability solution for managing infrastructure,"
he said.

For the companies offering Exchange Server as a hosted service, SP1 has technology
to resolve problems the product had with multitenancy, said Rurik Bradbury,
vice president of strategy for Microsoft hosting partner Intermedia. Multitenancy
is when a single Exchange Server environment serves multiple customers. Improvements
to multitenancy in SP1 make the product more stable for hosting partners, said
Bradbury, whose company has been testing the service pack.

Microsoft also did an about-face and reinstalled the "public folders"
feature of Outlook Web Access, the Web-based version of the Outlook e-mail client,
in SP1, he said. Workgroups within an organization traditionally could share
information through public folders on Outlook Web Access. However, Microsoft
"was trying to make everyone move" to its Office SharePoint Server
to provide this feature, "but now backtracked in the face of an outcry
from Exchange customers," Bradbury said.

In addition to these improvements, Microsoft also added a new disaster-recovery
feature to Exchange called Standby Continuous Replication (SCR), the company
said. SCR allows administrators to put a server running Exchange in a separate
geographic location to provide failover. But Bradbury was critical of the new
feature, saying that providing this kind of failover is "difficult and
would still involve e-mail downtime," as well as increase the cost of Exchange
Server because it requires deploying an extra server for the product.

One feature that Azaleos' McCall said is still missing from Exchange is message
archiving for storage management and compliance purposes. He said Microsoft
partners have been requesting this addition to the product for a while, but
Microsoft has made other features such as business continuity and high availability
its primary goals for Exchange until now. Azaleos offers its own archiving service
for Exchange, McCall said.

Before releasing Exchange Server 2007 SP1, Microsoft enlisted 270,000 beta
testers to kick the software's tires as part of its Technology Adoption Program
(TAP), with more than 30,000 of those testing the product with Windows Server
2008. The company is providing TAP
customer experiences online for users to read.

Microsoft released Exchange Server 2007 about a year ago, and said Thursday
that more than 3,000 companies representing more than 1 million seats are using
it. Still, McCall said that he has seen hesitation among customers to move from
Exchange Server 2003 to 2007, but that SP1 should encourage more to make the
leap.

IDG News Service

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