Exchange Server 2003: What's New
Host: Expert Host: Santhosh Kutty, Support Engineer - Microsoft India.
April 29, 2004
Kevin_MS : Hello & Welcome to the MSDN India Expert chat on Exchange Server 2003
Kevin_MS : We have with us Santhosh Kutty & Tirumal Kumar
Kevin_MS : Santhosh & Kumar work a Support Engineers at the Microsoft India Global Support Center
Santhosh_MS : Thanks Kevin. Welcome all to this Chat session today.
Kevin_MS : Welcome Santhosh & Kumar
Kumar_MS : Thanks Kevin
Kevin_MS : We request participants to type questions in the text box at the bottom of the Question Room
Santhosh_MS : Ok so we'll basically be covering several parts of the improvements made in Exchange 2003 over Exchange 2000.
Santhosh_MS : Exchange 2003 provides improved functionality in the following areas:
Santhosh_MS : Routing
Santhosh_MS : Support for Volume Shadow Copy service
Santhosh_MS : Support for Outlook 2003 Cached Exchange Mode
Santhosh_MS : Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2003
Santhosh_MS : Mobile Device Support for Exchange 2003
Santhosh_MS : and Outlook 2003
Santhosh_MS : But lets take a question or two first. Femke you had a question?
Santhosh_MS : Please feel free to ask questions as we go through various parts of improvements in Exchange 2003
Santhosh_MS : In terms of Security and Privacy improvements
8alien has joined the conversation.
Santhosh_MS : Distribution lists are now restricted to authenticated users
Santhosh_MS : Through Support of real-time Safe and Block lists we can now reduce the amount of unsolicited mail delivered to your organization with connection filtering
Kumar_MS Inbound recipient filtering. Reduce unsolicited e-mail messages by filtering inbound messages based on the recipient. Messages that are addressed to users that are not found, or to whom the sender does not have the permissions to send, are rejected. This applies only to messages sent by anonymously authenticated users
Santhosh_MS : There has also been several improvements on the Anti Spam front
Santhosh_MS : For filtering of email you can upload the Safe and Block Senders List to Exchange Server 2003
Santhosh_MS : As an administrator one would also have felt the pains in hackers using the server for spamming
Kumar_MS : exchange 2003 uses Kerberos for sending user credentials between the FE and BE
Santhosh_MS : Also you can now restrict relaying to a limited number of security principles through the standard Windows 2000 discretionary access control list (DACL). The ability to grant relaying to an IP address is still present.
Santhosh_MS : Ok so that's a good question especially when one sees that we can make do with Exchange 2000.
Santhosh_MS : The first and foremost reason would be Security
Santhosh_MS : A huge number of improvements have been made in terms of improving Spam Control and Relaying.
Kumar_MS : RPC over HTTP which replaces VPN is one of the feature included in 2003
Santhosh_MS : Productivity is also vastly improved
Santhosh_MS : using the AD Service you have a single seat administration possibility now
Kumar_MS : now 2003 comes with Active Sync bundled which is not the case in 2000
Santhosh_MS : Also instant online snapshot and backup of Exchange Server databases and storage groups with Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Copy service and Exchange Server 2003 is now possible
Kumar_MS : where we had to install Active Sync 2002 to support mobile devices
Santhosh_MS : Depending on the version you're migrating from Femke, you have the better benefits in terms of migration coming in as well.
Santhosh_MS : Through features such as Mailbox Recovery Center and Recovery Storage group, you now get improved management and support for clustering
Kumar_MS : Performance has been increased nearly 50% by configuring the Compression Support
Kumar_MS : in OWA
Santhosh_MS : But most importantly, you can capitalise on existing infrastructure as Exchange 2003 can coexist with Windows NT, Windows 2000, Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000
Santhosh_MS : It also runs on either Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) or Windows Server 2003
Kumar_MS : We can take the advantage of Windows 2003 volume shadow copy and fire online backups
Santhosh_MS : so that would cover the basic improvements in terms of security and backup
Santhosh_MS : Good Femke. But while that document talks about productivity, let's also see how performance has been improved.
Kumar_MS : Routing improvements are done keeping in view the oscillating links
Santhosh_MS : From a performance standpoint, we now can support for Virtual Memory monitoring, support for up to eight-node clusters and it is also integrated with Dr. Watson 2.0
Santhosh_MS : this enables a better reliability factor as opposed to previous versions of Exchange.
Kumar_MS : Query based Distribution groups is one more additional feature from the administration point of view
Santhosh_MS : That's right and with distribution list member caching, you complete lookups, insertions, and expirations more efficiently, resulting in a 60 percent reduction of Active Directory queries
Kumar_MS : When it comes to Security in OWA Cookie based logon and timed logoff in introduced
Santhosh_MS : Now that we've covered Security, Performance and Reliability enhancements, lets move to the deciding factor in a migration... and the big question is
Santhosh_MS : How is Administration made simpler.
Kumar_MS : Is it right Santhosh
Santhosh_MS : As Kumar had earlier mentioned, Exchange Server 2003 supports the Volume Shadow Copy service implemented in Windows Server 2003
Kumar_MS : a lot of improvements have been done to the Queue viewer
Santhosh_MS : This gives you nearly instantaneous backup and restore capabilities and takes away a major part of Administrator worries
Kumar_MS : new queue are exposed like DSN message pending submission, failed message retry queue,messages queued for deferred delivery
Santhosh_MS : One familiar situation that users faced earlier in earlier versions of Exchange Server was that you had to move log files yourself with directory modification tools and with the information gained from studying Microsoft Knowledge Base articles.
Santhosh_MS : now the Exchange Server System Manager can be used to reduce the downtime in such cases - message tracking log files, as well as X.400 message transfer agent (MTA) queue data and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) queue data can be moved using it.
Santhosh_MS : And so you see that from an Administrator stand point several major pains have been changed through a more easier to use management system
Kumar_MS : Moving mailboxes in EX system manager with multi threading, detailed XML report can be generated on the whole move
Santhosh_MS : So finally lets talk about deployment and migration improvements
Kumar_MS : that too scheduling with optional cut-off time along with auto skip and log option for any corrupted items found in the move
Santhosh_MS : For Admins and users who've migrated from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, its not been an easy path
Santhosh_MS : we now have a new set of deployment tools and documentation helps you deploy Exchange Server 2003 easily into an existing Exchange Server 5.5 setup
Santhosh_MS : For those familiar with the Active Directory Connector manager snap-in, the Active Directory Connector Wizard helps your deployment by analyzing an existing Exchange Server 5.5 topology, automatically preparing the Exchange Server 5.5 directory,
Santhosh_MS : and creating the needed connection agreements to ensure successful deployment.
Santhosh_MS : You have wizards such as the Internet Mail Wizard that helps you configure Internet mail connectivity.
Kumar_MS : we have improvements for Setup also
Kumar_MS : as Santosh said
Kumar_MS : Identical schema files in Active Directory Connector and Exchange
Kumar_MS : unlike previous version where the ADC schema files were subset of the core exchange schema files
Santhosh_MS : so such Schema improvements have enabled a better usage of the ADC as well.
Kumar_MS : Warning message appears if Exchange groups are moved, deleted, or renamed by mistakenly
Santhosh_MS : So finally to sum it up, Exchange 2003 has a huge number of improvements in terms of Security, Administration and also performance.
Santhosh_MS : To learn more about the various improvements you can use the following links
Kumar_MS : thanks for having attended this chat session
Santhosh_MS : Thanks all for attending this session and we hope you found it an informative session. Do keep look back at the MSDN Chat space for more events coming up
Kevin_MS : With that we have come to the end of today's chat session.
Kevin_MS : Santhosh & Kumar, thank you very much for joining us and answering our questions
Kevin_MS : For the participant of the chat, we have an interesting offer. If you mail
techin@microsoft.com with your postal addresses, we will send you a Exchange Server 2003 Evaluation Kit. The kit contains Exchange Server 2003 Enterp
Kevin_MS : Thank you all for joining us… Do join us for our next MSDN India Expert Chat
