Date Published: December 2007.
Author: Claudio Vacalebre.
Soundtrack: For Test, Author: Claudio Vacalebre.
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) has been designed specifically to help meet the challenges of any hosting provider businesses that delivery rich email and collaboration services. Exchange Server 2007 SP1 is a mission-critical communications tool that enables employees to be more productive and access their information anywhere and anytime while providing a messaging system that enables rich, efficient access to e-mail, calendar items, voice mail, and contacts. For the Hosting Operations administrator, Exchange Server 2007 SP1 provides advanced protection options against e-mail security threats, such as spam and viruses, as well as the tools to help manage internal compliance and high availability needs.
In Exchange Server 2007 SP1, several new features and improvements will extend the Anywhere Access capabilities of Exchange Server 2007 to help make users at the hosted SMB more productive on whatever device they’re using, provide additional Operational Efficiency tools for Service provider administrators seeking a streamlined management and deployment experience, and enable advanced Built-in Protection for more robust high availability and compliance scenarios.
Integrated Exchange Unified Messaging functionality with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.
Outlook Web Access additions, including public folder access, S/MIME support, personal distribution lists, and mailbox rules editor.
Webready document viewer supports Microsoft Office 2007 documents in addition to Microsoft Office 2003 documents.
Extended language support in Outlook Web Access with Arabic and Korean spell checking.
Operational Efficiency
Support for Windows Server 2008 deployments, including benefits in flexible clustering, native virtualization, advanced networking, and simplified management.
Additional tools in the Exchange Management Console, including public folder management and configuration options for clustering and POP/IMAP access.
Improvements to the Exchange Management Shell syntax and import-export PST in the move-mailbox command.
Wider variety of web services for application development, including public folder access, delegate management, and folder level permissions.
Built-in Protection
Addition of Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) for site resilient high availability deployments.
Extended Exchange ActiveSync policies for mobile policy enforcement.
Secure Real Time Protocol (SRTP) support in the Unified Messaging role.
Support for IPv6 when using Windows Server 2008.
This section has been updated in January 2008: Exchange Server 2007 SP1 is now supported! read the next news!
Here the original section: From the Hoster perspective this SP1 is adding a lot of value, not only related to the new features mentioned in the previous pane but also in terms of scalability. We know that several fixes has been included in this Service Pack which will further improve the already great scalability potential Exchange server 2007 is showing.
I really think that the Microsoft HMC team is working hard to complete the SP1 testing on HMC 4.0 to be able to communicate as soon as possible the official support of SP1 in HMC 4.0.
Until then AND if you are an Hoster with a HMC 4.0 deployment in place, I discourage you to deploy it in the production environment (unless you are aware and accept the risk of troubleshooting issues without support from Microsoft).