Real World Benefits of New Exchange Server 2010 Features

The Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate has been released just recently, which means that the feature set for the product is now locked in and all that remains before RTM are bug fixes.  You can read about the new features of Exchange 2010 on Technet.  Here are a few that solve real world problems for our clients right away.

Cross-Premises Email Routing – Microsoft cites the example of a school that wishes to use on-premises email for staff and an externally hosted service for students.  We have deployed Exchange in many schools that would love to do exactly that, as well as some large enterprises that want to retain highly available, mission critical mail services in one system and move non-critical users onto a cheaper platform elsewhere.

Enhanced Disclaimers – immediately solves the problem of customers wanting to include links, images, or dynamically generate their disclaimers using AD attributes and have had to turn to third party commerical options to do this.

Moderated Transport – this feature solves the problem of protecting distribution lists from inappropriate use without totally blocking them off from important emails.

Reduced IOPS – improvements to the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) have reduced disk IOPS requirements by as much as 70% from Exchange Server 2007, making Exchange storage sizing a much simpler and less costly exercise.  In a discussion with Microsoft they sketched out a storage layout of single 1TB SATA II disks (without RAID) each hosting a single database for hundreds (or thousands) of users.

High Availability – the enhancements to high availability (now being called “continuous availability”) are nothing short of spectacular, with Database Availability Groups (DAG) providing per-database failover capabilities, making failover scenarios more efficient and easier to plan for.

Seamless Mailbox Moves – with MAPI connectivity abstracted to the Client Access Server layer mailbox moves on the backend database can occur without interrupting client connectivity.  Obviously this makes scheduling of any mailbox move scenario a much easier task.