Microsoft Exchange Server 2003

To compete successfully in today's challenging business climate, organizations must enable more efficient ways for knowledge workers to communicate and collaborate. E-mail is currently the most widely used collaborative technology. More businesses use Exchange Server for e-mail-based collaboration than any other product. Exchange Server 2003 enables knowledge workers to gain access to critical business communications almost whenever and wherever they need to and is designed to deliver greater security, availability, and reliability.If you're in an Exchange Server 5.5 environment, Exchange Server 2003 offers large costs savings by operating on fewer servers. With new resources and tools, the upgrade and migration to Exchange Server 2003 is smooth, fast, and cost-effective.

Mobile E-Mail Improvements SP2 offers a huge leap forward in mobility capabilities. With SP2, Exchange Server 2003 can offer a significantly improved Microsoft Outlook experience on mobile devices as well as additional security and device control. As always, the Exchange ActiveSync protocol does not require expensive software or outsourcing fees to access data on your server running Exchange Server.On the performance front, a lot of work has been done to make Exchange work harder on existing hardware. Rather than it needing a newer, faster server to handle 2003, you’ll almost certainly find that it runs better than your existing version. This is partly thanks to the improved performance that Windows 2003 offers for large servers, but also because Exchange 2003 handles its jobs more intelligently. For example, out of office auto-replies are no longer sent when triggered by a message from a distribution list. And, on the topic of distribution lists, Exchange now caches the members of internal distribution lists so that it needs to query the Active Directory much less often.

Administrators will almost certainly find that this is the easiest version of Exchange yet, because a number of new features have been implemented that correct niggling flaws. For example, you can now move several mailboxes from one server to another in one step using the Active Directory management console. However, the biggest new administration boost comes when you install Exchange on top of Windows Server 2003. Exchange 2003 takes advantage of the new Volume Shadow Copy service, which allows in-place, snapshot back-ups of your Exchange server. This functionality is remarkably quick, and ensures you get a fully atomic back-up without any downtime.After deployment ease, the next biggest improvement in Exchange 2003 is its reliability. During the initial phase of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing drive, new feature development in Exchange stopped entirely, with the focus instead turned to reliability and security of the overall system. The results of this are visible in the three key reliability improvements: larger clusters, faster failover, and recovery storage groups. If you used Exchange clustering in the past, you’ll know it’s the easiest and most dependable way of making sure your system continues to work despite serious hardware failure. This has been taken a step further by the fact that you can now have up to eight nodes in your cluster. Furthermore, whereas in previous versions of Exchange there used to be complicated dependencies between the various parts of the system, this has now been stripped to a minimum to ensure that the protocol services are independent of the main data store. While this is only likely to be important if you suffer hardware failure on a standalone machine, it’s reassuring to have, regardless.

There have been two key security additions with this release of OWA, and these are URL redirection and attachment blocking. URL redirection kicks in whenever an OWA user receives a message with a URL in it. In previous versions of OWA, clicking this link took you directly to the URL. However, thanks to the way that HTTP works, this left an entry in the log of the website you clicked through to that said “this person came from OWA; here’s the name of the server, and the name of the message they were reading” – not very secure. With 2003, in the form of URL redirection, this problem has been eliminated.Attachment blocking is a very clever new feature that lets you stop people from downloading sensitive message attachments from outside your corporate network. With the fact that OWA 2003 now uses automatic connection time-outs to make sure that unattended sessions aren’t a security breach, this is definitely the most secure version of OWA yet.One particularly hyped new feature in Exchange 2003 is that the OWA service is now available to more than just desktop web browsers. Other Windows-powered devices, such as PDAs and Smartphones are able to connect to, and use OWA, albeit with a more limited interface depending on the capabilities of the client. At present, most companies are quite paranoid about wireless access, so it will be interesting to see how this new mobile functionality pans out.