Exchange & Outlook

Mobility News from Microsoft, Verizon, Adobe

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:00:01 MST

Last week saw the emergence of several major news items in the mobility world, all of which have something to do with Microsoft Exchange Server. Of course, it's no coincidence that these things happened during the same week, but the overlap is pretty interesting.

First, Microsoft delivered on its promised release date for Windows Mobile 6.5, along with the launch of its new "Windows phone" branding campaign. Because of the way that Windows Mobile is built and released, Microsoft actually shipped the bits to OEMs about six months ago. The OEMs, such as HTC, integrated their device-specific drivers and extensions, then the mobile operators (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile) added their customizations and extensions. That process gives the OEMs and mobile operators great flexibility, but it also raises one of the biggest complaints about Windows Mobile: Mobile operators have shown a great degree of ingenuity and capability when it comes to taking a perfectly functional Windows Mobile build and crapping it up with all sorts of add-on icons, programs, and general junk.

From an Exchange perspective, the big news in Windows Mobile 6.5 is its dramatically improved version of Outlook Mobile. Sporting an Outlook 2010–like conversation view, SMS syncing with your primary mailbox, an inline player for voicemail, and a ton of other features, Outlook Mobile is one of the best things about Windows Mobile 6.5, especially because it can be upgraded over the air. In fact, Windows Mobile 6.1 devices can get in on the fun, too, using Exchange 2010's ability to provide a bootstrap loader that the mobile device can use to download and run the correct version of the Outlook Mobile 6.5 installer.

For the second piece of news, Verizon (which launched a Windows Mobile 6.5 device last week) announced that it was planning on releasing new devices based on Google's Android OS. This news is interesting for a couple of reasons. One reason is that the base Android OS doesn't include Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) support, although HTC includes EAS support in some of its Android phones (and although there are several third-party Android EAS clients available). Verizon is now in the enviable position of supporting three families of Exchange-capable devices: BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Mobile. That doesn't seem to leave much room for the rumored Verizon version of the iPhone. Separately, Verizon introduced a new campaign criticizing AT&T's well-known 3G network problems; it'll be fun to see how that plays out in the coming months.

The third mobile news item last week came from Adobe, who announced that it's going to deliver Flash runtime capability for Windows Mobile, Android, Palm webOS, and BlackBerry devices. Apart from opening up the floodgates for poorly written Flash-based games, this development introduces the possibility that we'll see social media applications—such as the very popular TweetDeck app, which is built on Adobe's AIR technology—that take greater advantage of the wealth of data stored in Exchange databases via mobile devices. (Personally, I sure would like to see a mobile-device equivalent of the managed version of the Exchange Web Services library.)

As a final note, Motorola vice president Christy Wyatt was quoted in the press as saying, in reference to the number of mobile operating systems, "We just don't believe long term it's going to be sustainable . . . you'll see the number go from 10, down to 8, down to 5, down to hopefully 2 or 3." We'll see if she's right.

Exchange 2010 Released to Manufacturing

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:00:01 MST

Microsoft today announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Exchange Server 2010 with a post on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog. This is great news, especially for those who have been waiting for its release to move from Exchange 2003. The formal launch will take place in early November at TechEd Europe in Berlin.

Microsoft has been talking about Exchange 2010 for quite some time, and I figure that by now most UPDATE readers already have a good idea what to expect from its new features. I wanted to talk a little bit about the release process itself, though.

As you might know, Microsoft's been using Exchange 2010 to host almost 10 million mailboxes through its Live@edu and Exchange Labs programs. This is a huge departure for Exchange, which historically has been tested before release on a few hundred thousand mailboxes at most. One of the explicit design goals for Exchange 2010 was to have the same code scale and run well for both hosted and on-premises use. Large-scale testing was necessary to validate that the goal had been met.

Of course, Microsoft's own operations weren't the only ones using Exchange 2010 during its development. Members of the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) ran it, too, with more than 100,000 mailboxes of their own in production use from fairly early on. TAP members get access to interim builds and technical support from the Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) engineers who are in the beta support rotation. In exchange, the TAPs have to wring out the product thoroughly and suffer through the occasional problems and failures that inevitably happen during the development cycle.

Microsoft has TAPs for other programs, too, but the Exchange TAP is exceptional in several ways. For instance, based on their personal experience with the product, TAP members vote on whether it's ready to be released. If there are major bugs that prevent TAPs from using the product in production, they can blow the whistle and delay the RTM until things are fixed. The Exchange developers made builds of Exchange 2010 available to TAP members on a regular, and frequent, schedule so that changes and bug fixes could be evaluated sooner rather than later.

The most remarkable thing about the Exchange TAP program, though, is the extraordinary degree of engagement and support that the product team provides to TAP members. The project managers, developers, testers, and management on the Exchange team actively asked for feedback, paid careful attention to it, and often stepped in to help solve thorny problems that the TAP members faced—even when, as in a couple of my own situations, they were self-inflicted!

I don't know what the official street date for Exchange 2010 is, but a reminder: Volume license customers will be able to download it before the retail kits are built and shipped, so I'd expect that to be within the next month.

I'm curious to know whether your plans to deploy Exchange 2010 have changed based on what you've learned since TechEd North America this summer. Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.

Exchange 2007 and Windows Server 2008 R2

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:00:01 MST

Microsoft recently announced that Exchange Server 2007 wouldn't be supported on Windows Server 2008 R2. This decision has generated a bit of controversy, with Exchange administrators asking why a still-current product isn't being supported on a brand-new OS. In an attempt to clarify its reasoning, the Exchange product team posted an explanation on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog that boiled down to two points:

Exchange 2007 SP2 was in development before the Server 2008 R2 release cycle, so SP2 would have been "delayed significantly" if it had to be tested against R2
Microsoft doesn't support upgrading the OS of an existing Exchange installation, and they don't plan to change this stance. They say that customer feedback indicates that the big need relative to Server 2008 R2 is to support R2 domain controllers, which Exchange 2007 SP2 does.

These points seem reasonable. After all, the product group is nearly done with a huge revision to Exchange in the form of Exchange Server 2010. Diverting testing and engineering resources to make sure that Exchange 2007 runs on a not-yet-released OS (remember, R2's street date is October 22) that you can't upgrade to in-place anyway doesn't make much sense.

However, I think there's another reason it makes sense not to support R2 with Exchange 2007: What would we actually gain?

Take a look at Microsoft's list of the top 10 reasons to upgrade to Server 2008 R2 and you'll see what I mean. Reduced desktop costs? Ubiquitous remote access? Although these features are no doubt useful (and some, like DirectAccess, are technically sweet as well), they have nothing to do with Exchange. Improvements to R2's Hyper-V implementation would benefit Exchange deployments, but to take advantage of them you'd have to be running your Exchange organization in a VM anyway, not directly on the host OS, so that point is moot too.

This isn't to say that R2 doesn't have other interesting reasons for a potential upgrade. For example, the Active Directory (AD) Recycle Bin is a neat concept that I think could be very useful in large-scale Exchange deployments, and the aforementioned DirectAccess (along with the new BranchCache system) is a terrific enhancement for distributed networks. However, there's just not much in R2 that directly benefits Exchange 2010, much less Exchange 2007, so I think the decision to put engineering resources into new development, rather than sustaining engineering support for running Exchange 2007 SP2 on R2, is further validated.

Having said that, it will be really interesting to see what the prevalent combination of OSs and Exchange versions will be a year from now. There's clearly a strong wave of pent-up demand for Exchange 2010 from companies that are on Exchange 2003 and are skipping Exchange 2007 altogether, but how will that translate into OS deployments? We'll have to wait to find out, but I'm betting that Server 2008 isn't ready to ride off into the sunset just yet.

Load Testing with Exchange 2010

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:00:01 MST

Load testing has been part of the Microsoft Exchange Server landscape for a long time. The MAPI Messaging Benchmark (MMB) suite of tests was designed to provide a way to measure the performance of a given set of hardware; see this 9-year-old Exchange UPDATE article for more details. The problem with benchmarks, of course, is that they provide an almost endless number of ways to get things wrong.

There are two ways to resolve this problem. One way is to have an ever-more regimented set of benchmark procedures, which is the approach taken in the database world with the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) series of benchmarks. The other way is to move away from benchmarking—which tries to answer the question, "Who's the fastest?"—and do load testing instead, which tries to answer the question, "Is this hardware fast enough?" For Exchange Server, Microsoft has adopted the latter approach.

You might remember that when Exchange 2007 launched, Microsoft made some fairly strong claims about the improvement in I/O performance compared to Exchange 2003. In fact, I/O reduction was one of the major design elements of both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010. Reducing the number of disk I/O operations required to service a given workload means that you can get by with smaller numbers of disk spindles, which means that many workloads no longer need SANs because they can efficiently use large-capacity SATA disks instead of faster, smaller, more expensive SAN disks. (Stay tuned to Windows IT Pro for more in-depth articles on the storage and database layout changes in Exchange 2010.)

However, you'd have to be very, very trusting to take Microsoft's word about the impact of these changes. There are so many variables that can influence Exchange disk performance that the only way to be sure is to test Exchange on the hardware you plan to use (or a reasonable facsimile) and see how it performs. That's what the Exchange Load Generator (Loadgen) toolset is for; it was originally released in January 2007 and has been periodically updated. The newest update was released last week. It's a superset of the Exchange 2007 version of Loadgen that adds support for Exchange 2010 in a number of ways:

It properly generates load for Exchange 2010's all-new OWA implementation.
It can dynamically generate mail content according to a profile you specify so that you get on-demand messages instead of having to use a canned set.
It incorporates support for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). I haven't tested this feature yet, but I'm eager to because scaling Client Access servers for EAS devices is still very much a black art that requires a lot of guesswork and overprovisioning.

At the same time, Microsoft also released a new version of Jetstress, the I/O load tester that lets you validate whether your storage subsystem design can deliver enough I/O operations per second (IOPS) to meet a given Exchange load. The big news here is that the new version implements the Exchange 2010 database I/O profile, including the change to a 32Kb page size. It also imitates the behavior of Exchange 2010's log replication toolset.

Running these tools doesn't guarantee that you won't have performance-related problems, but it certainly does make it less likely!

Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007 Reach Milestones

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:00:01 MST

There's been some big news since my last UPDATE column. First, the Detroit Lions won a football game. If you count exhibition games, that win means that they won't lose all of their games this year. I eagerly await the regular season to see if they can keep their winning streak alive. Now, on to the Exchange Server news.

Microsoft shipped the release candidate (RC) of Exchange Server 2010 on August 17. The RC is feature-complete, meaning that it includes all the features that Microsoft intends to have in the final release. Exchange 2010 is already deployed to nearly 10 million users worldwide, which itself is a significant milestone. Microsoft supports pre-release software for production use only if you're in one of its early-adopter programs. However, the Exchange 2010 RC release announcement specifically mentioned that the RC can be upgraded in-place to the final release version. Make of that what you will.

Interestingly, the announcement included the fact that Exchange Server all by itself generated nearly $2 billion of revenue for Microsoft. According to Microsoft, that would make Exchange the ninth-largest software company in revenue. I was curious, so I looked up the 2008 Fortune 1000 list of largest American companies based on revenue, and found that Exchange would come in at around 900 even when matched against all different types of companies. Not too shabby!

Of course, not everyone is ready to rush into deployment of Exchange 2010. For those of us who are on Exchange 2007, the big news came this week with the official release of Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2007. Apart from Exchange 2010 coexistence, SP2 includes several other major features. The biggest, and no doubt most eagerly awaited, feature is a plug-in that lets the in-box Windows Server 2008 Windows Backup tool properly back up and restore Exchange 2007 data. My favorite SP2 feature is probably its enhanced security auditing.

Administrators have long complained that Exchange doesn’t log enough information about access attempts to maintain an audit trail for tracking unauthorized access, though it does use the built-in Windows audit feature to track logon attempts on mailboxes. The problem is that Exchange itself often generates legitimate logon attempts (as when requesting calendar information) that make it hard to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate access. SP2 adds the ability to log auditing events when user A takes specific action in user B’s mailbox, including opening a folder, opening a message, using the Send As permission, or sending on behalf of a user. This auditing ignores access requests generated by the system, such as calendar free/busy requests.

You have to turn on auditing for specific access types because it’s off by default. When enabled, you’ll see message and folder access events logged in the application event log. The new GUI for changing the diagnostic logging level of different components runs a close second to enhanced security auditing as a favorite SP2 feature. It’s about time that Microsoft offered a simple way to change this setting.

Microsoft still hasn't set a definitive release date for Exchange 2010, nor has the company released details on pricing and licensing terms. I expect to see such details coming in the near future, probably at an upcoming IT-pro focused event such as TechEd Europe.

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