Exchange 2010 Public Beta 1 announced and released

It's been a while since I posted, mostly because work and life has been keeping me busy. However, this should be changing more with this recent news.

Today, Microsoft announced the public release of Beta 1 of their next generation of the Exchange messaging platform, known internally as Exchange 14 (or E14, or wave 14) is now officially known as Exchange 2010.

More information available at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=135925

Download available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1898ed2c-2f88-48ac-824e-d3d20fad77d7

Team blog entry: (not yet posted)

Major Features

• Able to move from single server to clustered node with one physical server now
  
• When a mailbox move is occurring, the user is NOT offline (2010 to 2010 only)
  
• Users can manage their own group membership, as well as see their own message tracking
  
• Browser agnostic OWA premium for Firefox, Safari
  
• Federated Free/Busy (FINALLY) - allow external partners to also share in scheduling ability (I presume this will require them to also be 2010.
  
• Mail tips - warns users before doing something that might be an issue like sending an email to a large DL, or sending to a group they don't have permission to. (requires new Outlook 14 as well)
  
• OWA presence integration (assuming OCS 2007 R2+)
  
• Email archive mailbox support
  
• eDiscovery portal for compliance searching
  
• Mailbox, Hub Transport, and Client Access roles can be clustered
  
• CCR can now be more than two nodes
  

  
  

  Major removed or played down features:
  

  
  

• No support for Win 2003 x64 - 2008 x64 ONLY
  
• Local continuous replication no more
  
• Fax services (was in UM component)
  
• SCC clusters, also shared storage and pre-installing clusters will wither away
  
• Storage Groups (don't flip, its cool - since most HA/DR (CCR/SCR required each DB to have it's own SG anyhow, this seems like a natural transition. The SG idea is replaced by DAG (database availability groups)
  
• Streaming backups
  
• Outlook no longer talks to mailbox role - all on CAS role now