Exchange Server 2010

Exchange 2010 is a mail server provided by Microsoft in order to use for communication between users using e-mails, specialty of such a mail server is that, users in a network can access this mail server for sending and receiving mails, with or without using Internet. Exchange's major features consist of electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage.

Maintaining a separate mail server in a company instead of using pubic mail servers like gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail etc, helps the company to get a much more secure, reliable and flexible communication. The installation, configuration and management of the mail server are covered under this syllabus.

New features in Exchange Server 2010

• 1)Legal hold: - This feature allows you to preserve the contents of an Exchange mailbox. Users can still use their mailbox in the usual manner, but copies of all items are retained, even if they delete them or if archived content would otherwise have expired
• 2)Multi mailbox search: - Multi mailbox search allows a designated person to perform organization-level searches across users’ mailboxes. The search interface is designed to allow administrators to search for multiple keywords or phrases simultaneously.
• 3)Exchange Control Panel: - The Exchange Control Panel is a new management tool built into Exchange 2010. It is definitely a welcome addition. The Exchange Control Panel is integrated into OWA. It allows users to perform a few basic self-service tasks, such as changing their contact information. For administrators, the Exchange Control Panel provides a way of performing some of the more common management tasks remotely using a Web interface.
• 4)Database availability groups: - Database availability groups allow you to designate multiple servers to host copies of individual databases. In the event of a failure, Exchange can automatically recover. Databases are no longer server specific, so you are free to mix and match the database replicas that are hosted on each mailbox server.
• 5)Database-level failover: - Exchange 2010 supports database-level fail over. That way, if a failure affects only a single database, that database can fail over without disrupting the other databases on the server.
• 6)Voice mail transcription: - Exchange 2010 uses a speech recognition engine to automatically transcribe voice mail messages. Users still receive the voice message as an email attachment, but the email message also contains a written transcript of the voice message. Users can check their voice messages even when they don’t have access to a sound card. More important, the transcription feature allows the contents of voice messages to be indexed along with traditional email messages.
• 7)Call answering rules: - In Exchange 2010, though, each user has his or her own personal auto attendant, which Microsoft refers to as the Call Answering Rules feature. Call answering rules allows users to create their own call routing options. So, for instance, an important call might be forwarded to a user’s cell phone, while a less important call might go straight to voice mail.
• 8)Personal archive: - In Exchange 2010, each user can now have two mailboxes — a primary mailbox and an archive mailbox. By using an archive mailbox, users can keep their primary mailboxes uncluttered. They’re free to browse their archive mailbox at will, and items can be automatically moved from their primary mailbox to their archive mailbox using retention policies.
• 9)Retention policies: - Retention policies allow messages to be tagged in a way that reflects their useful lifespan and what should happen when they expire. For example, you could specify that items in one folder should be deleted after 30 days, while items in another folder should be moved to the archives after five years. Users can also apply retention policies to individual messages that are separate from folder-level policies.
• 10)Role-based access control: - Exchange 2010 uses a new access control model called role-based access control. Now, administrators can perform delegation based on the role that the delegate will be performing. This means that rather than guessing which permissions the delegate will need, the administrator can simply tell Exchange which tasks the delegate will be performing.