stuart test blog

Great news… This just in from the EHLO blog: 

This morning, we signed off Exchange 2007 for release to you!

We’ve bet the company on this product. Here at Microsoft, we have over 120,000 mailboxes running in production on Exchange 2007 – exceeding our SLA of 99.95% availability. Likewise, over 200 Technology Adoption Partners and Rapid Deployment Partners have over 55,000 mailboxes in production operating within their enterprise SLA’s.

In addition to taking the time to ensure this software was rock solid for you, we’ve invested more time in documentation and deployment guidance than we have for any other release previously. Please do check it out and let us know if we’re missing something you need.

Thank you for all of your support, feedback, and patience during this journey by our team. We are committed to working with you on successful deployments in the coming months and years.

On behalf of the entire Exchange team, thank you for choosing Exchange.

–Terry

Source: Signed off!
Originally published on Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:32:57 GMT by Exchange

More Exchange 2007 stuff from Microsoft… Here’s a bunch of case studies for migrating to Exchange 2007 – they cover a wide range of businesses and scenarios, so they should be applicable to all sizes of environments.

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/search.aspx?ProTaxID=1267

The latest edition of Microsoft’s free, downloadable, TechNet magazine is now available. There’s lots of good Exchange 2007 stuff in there so it’s worth checking out.

• December TechNet magazine
• Direct download link as CHM

Microsoft have just RTW’d (released to web) version 6.0 of the RDP client which can be installed on Windows XP SP2 machines. This new version supports all the new RDP features that have been introduced with Vista and Longhorn. You also get a lot of new performance options so that you can now disable many of the Windows effects while connecting.

If you use the RDP client a lot, this is definitely worth getting. Link here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…

I’ve just been reading a good blog post from the MS Exchange team (You had me at EHLO) detailing some recommendations for your Exchange 2007 hardware requirements. Here are the links:

• UPDATED: Exchange 2007 Processor and Memory Recommendations
• Performance Benchmarks for Computers Running Exchange Server 2003
• CPU and memory scalability for Exchange Server 2003 and for Exchange 2000 Server
• Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer

Microsoft have recently created a new page on their Vista site that provides details on their new offering for Software Assurance customers. They’ve bundled up their recent purchases of Winternals, Softricity, and DesktopStandard into a free offering for those that sign up for Microsoft’s controversial licensing program. Here are some of the details from the site:

Using the solution’s virtualization, dynamic streaming and desktop manageability technologies, customers will:

• Improve PC manageability
  • Streamline and accelerate the entire application management lifecycle from planning and predictable deployment, to using, maintaining and migrating software
  • Further reduce total cost of ownership of the Windows desktop
  • Enhance management of software assets
• Accelerate and simplify desktop deployments and migrations
  • Reduce end-user downtime
  • Increase IT and business agility
• Enhance change management process and roll backs
  • Enhance group policy management
  • Reduce downtime
  • Provide end users with on-demand access to applications for which they are assigned

Source: Windows Vista: Optimizing the Windows Desktop

Microsoft are following VMware’s lead by providing pre-built virtual machines for download. Have a look at this search on the Microsoft downloads site and you’ll find a few there already: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?pocId=&freetext=VHD&DisplayLang=en

These are only official trial versions from Microsoft, so VMware still has the lead here with a whole community of user-created virtual machines most of which are fully-licensed machines ready to run. But these offerings from Microsoft will definitely make it easier for end-users to trial Microsoft’s software.

Just noticed today that the Sysinternals site has completed its migration to Microsoft’s TechNet site. The new address is http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx

I’ve had a quick dig around and noticed this tool which looks new, Process Monitor. Here’s a screenshot from the site:

Everything else seems to be the same apart from the lack of source code which Microsoft have said they will not be migrating due to lack of interest as well as potential future complications as the tools get merged into the Microsoft suite.

Another juicy bit of documentation for the AD geeks out there. This is an updated version of Microsoft’s best-practice documentation for recovering your Active Directory forest.

Brief Description

This paper is a best-practice recommendation for recovering an Active Directory® directory service forest, if forest-wide failure has rendered all domain controllers in the forest incapable of functioning normally.

On This Page

Source: Download details: Forest Recovery

This is more of a bookmark for me rather than a blog post, but there may be others out there interested in this MSDN blog focusing on (much-needed) ADFS documentation.

Link to ADFS Documentation Blog