New Features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Exchange Server 2010 offers better performance, more reliability and security, simplified administration and achieves end users requirements. Microsoft is offering lots of new features with this new edition, but also deemphasized few features which were available in the previous versions. This article highlights these features to understand our readers these new offerings from the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 so as to let readers to understand how this edition of Exchange server fit into their requirements.

1) New Database Availability Groups (DAG) replacing Clusters. Clusters are no longer required.(But quorum and heartbeat still being used). Local Continuous Replication is no more.

2) No Streaming files.

3) OWA/Mailbox connection, Directory Access, Public Folder connection and MAPI requests are forwarded to the RPC Client Access Services role, unlike in Exchange Server 2007, where all client connection requests except MAPI, uses the Client Access Server (CAS) role.

4) New Exchange Control Panel for users so that they can change their personal information from OWA like, contact details etc.

5) 64-bit version with improved IOPS.

6) Shadow Redundancy feature where message deleted from mail.que will be delayed until Exchange Server 2010 verify that message has completed all the hops and then message will be deleted. If any of the hop is failed, message will be resubmitted for delivery.

7) Exchange Server 2010 can be managed remotely across the network by using PowerShell V2.

8) Legal Hold feature which keeps user's deleted and edited items from their mailbox and Personal Archives. It also notifies users that hold has been placed on mailboxes. Hold on public folders is not supported till now.

9) MailTips feature notify the senders while he is composing the message that recipient is out of the office.

10) End-to-end message tracking.

11) Support of disabling TLS for WAN topologies.

12) Fully integration with Active Directory Right Management System.

13) Message throttling ensures that message rate is not exceeded that it is allowed to the users, regardless of the IP address.

14) Voice recognization support.

15) Support to send mails from Exchange Management Console.

16) Sharing of Calendar with users in different organization.

17) Support of multi-mailbox search.

18) Single Instance Storage(SIS) removed. New Message Retention Management feature introduced.