UC Unleashed

The Exchange Product Group has finally released to the public some information regarding the upcoming service pack for Exchange 2010. A coming beta will allow admins to test in their own labs.

Among the cool features are:

Import PST Files

1. Import historical e-mail data from PST files directly into Exchange 2010

Archive

1. locate the Personal Archive on a different mailbox database than primary mailbox
2. Delegate access to a user’s Personal Archive
3. Support access to a user’s Personal Archive in Outlook 2007

Search

1. Multi-Mailbox Search (aka Discovery): Search preview to obtain an estimate of number of items in search result-set with keyword statistics— before messages are copied to the discovery mailbox
2. Multi-Mailbox Search: Search result de-duplication— only copies one instance of a message to the discovery mailbox, reduces amount of messages you need to review following the search
3. Multi-Mailbox Search: Annotation of reviewed items

OWA

1. OWA: Pre-fetch message content
2. OWA: Delete, mark-as-read, and categorize operations run asynchronously
3. OWA: Long-running operations such as attaching a very large file will not block the rest of the OWA experience
4. OWA: Number of other UI improvements
5. OWA: Web-Ready Document Viewing of IRM-protected documents in Safari on a Mac, and FireFox and Internet Explorer on Windows
6. OWA: OWA themes are back!
7. OWA: Reading pane can be placed on the bottom or on the right

Calendar Sharing

1. Users can share calendars with anonymous viewers via the web (provided the admin enables the capability)

Mobility

1. Mobility: Tether-free IRM support in EAS
2. Mobility: Support for Send-As
3. Mobility: Notifying users if their device is placed on block or quarantine
4. Mobility: Full implementation of conversation view

Management UI: Exchange 2010 SP1 brings plenty of new management UI in both EMC and ECP, including:

1. Create/configure Retention Tags + Retention Policies in EMC
2. Configure Transport Rules in ECP
3. Configure Journal Rules in ECP
4. Configure MailTips in ECP
5. Provision and configure Personal Archive in ECP
6. Configure Litigation Hold in ECP
7. Configure Allow/Block/Quarantie mobile device policies in ECP
8. RBAC role management in ECP
9. Configure DAG IP Addresses and Alternate Witness Server in EMC
10. Recursive public folder settings management (including permissions) in EMC

For more information, including a video, see the Product Groups blog post “Yes Virginia, there is an Exchange Server 2010 SP1“, as well as Bharat Suneja’s blog post “Announced: Exchange 2010 SP1, Beta in June“.