Microsoft has announced that Service Pack 2 for Exchange Server 2007 will be released in Q3 of this year. The MS Exchange Team has listed some of the key new features in their blog post here.
A welcome addition is the new volume snapshot backup plugin for Windows Server 2008. Currently Exchange Server 2007 cannot be backed up by the built-in backup application that ships with Windows Server 2008. Microsoft announced nearly a year ago that they were working on adding this functionality in a future update to Exchange, which we can now expect in SP2 when it is released soon.
The backup plugin doesn’t operate in the way we’re familiar with in previous version of Windows Server when backup up Exchange. The MS Exchange Team explains the backup and restore operations in more detail in this blog post.