So we have had Exchange 2010 for a little over a month and so far hasn’t given us too many problems. Migration was an experience I don’t want to repeat in a hurry but the EDA or Exchange Deployment Assistant greased the wheels a bit.
Here are some of our findings so far. Bearing in mind we have only had the system live a few weeks and we’re bound to have plenty yet to discover. So far our time with the platform has been positive.
- OWA interoperability – Outlook Web Access now plays nicely with others. Not only does it offer almost everything Outlook 2010 is supposed to, you can now also use it with other browsers. Microsoft have opened it up so it works well in Opera, Firefox and even Safari. A very good development in a platform, especially for an organization who uses multiple operating systems.
- No client necessary – While we’re waiting for Office 2010 for Outlook, we found we don’t actually need it yet. We will to enjoy the other features, but for now we can use it happily without it. Even down to the sounds for calendar alerts.
- Availability – With the death of local replication, the new Database Availability Grouping is a godsend. Multiple versions of databases on multiple machines allows our availability to hit 99.99%. It took a while to get right, but when we did there were sighs of relief all round.
- Self Service - The bane of our lives is slowly easing. The new Exchange Control Panel means the users can manage their own groups, addresses, holiday messages, rules, virus protection and much more. They can use it through a web page and manage many of the tasks that used to take up the majority of our time.
- Exchange Test Tool – So simple yet so effective. This is a network or internet tool that allows us to test different facets of a rollout before making them live. From it we can test SMTP messaging, ActiveSync and Outlook Anywhere. Useful.
- Improved views – Not only do we now have the conversation view, which allows for message threading for longer conversations but we no longer have the annoying previous and next buttons. Now we have scroll bars, which makes the whole message navigation thing a breeze. If we have long running support cases, this view makes it easy to see who said what, and when. That way we don’t repeat what someone has just said, or ask the user to try something twice. Happier user, happier us.
We won’t get to fully utilize the system until Outlook 2010 arrives, but what we have seen so far is positive. The Outlook Web Access is a good alternative for message management, and offers much more than the old version. The fact that we don’t have to use it with Internet Explorer is a definite bonus.
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