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GCN Home > 01/08/07 issue

Upgrade of the year

Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007 delivers powerful new capabilities for e-mail

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

In November in New York’s Times Square, Microsoft Corp. celebrated a triad of major new product releases: Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer touted the benefits of each product, but of the three, Exchange Server 2007 was probably the least discussed. Nonetheless, it may well end up being the Microsoft product that has the biggest impact on federal agency system administrators.

True, most government employees are only dimly aware of what Exchange does.

They’re more familiar with its PC front end, the Outlook e-mail client. They might not understand that Exchange is the back-end e-mail server that organizes and delivers the mail to Outlook, and keeps tabs on their appointments and contacts.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, an upgrade from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, will offer some powerful new features for users and administrators. Users will enjoy the larger mailboxes and the greater ability to schedule meetings. Administrators will dig the new command-line interface and improved configuration management.

“Exchange is the most important upgrade for us simply because it is an e-mail engine, and e-mail is considered by most to be the most mission-critical information system that we currently use,” said Anthony Hebert, principal technology architect for the Truckee Meadows Water Authority, which supplies water for the greater metropolitan areas of Reno, Nev.

At present, the Truckee Meadows Water Authority in Reno, Nev., has six servers now running Exchange Server 2003 for 300 mailboxes. The agency monitors how well the e-mail service is running, and remediates problems using Zenprise, from the company of the same name, located in Fremont, Calif. The agency wants to upgrade to Exchange 2007 in the near future.

“Of course we could run Exchange Server 2003 just fine, but we keep the latest version of code to stay as secure as possible,” Hebert said.

The organization is now testing Exchange Server 2007, running on a Hewlett-Packard 585DL server with quad dual-core AMD Opteron processors and 32GB of RAM. “We understand this will be a massive upgrade, so we’re taking as much time as possible to get ourselves familiar with the product,” Hebert said.

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