New Stuff: There have been a number of changes to the UI, applications and also support for x64. The ?Ribbon? has been introduced to all applications which gives users a consistent interface at the top of the screen. It can be customised to allow easy access of key tools and features, to get your suite looking just the way you want it.

64-bit support: Microsoft has made office 2010 available in a x64-edition, which is a first for the suite. It will only run on x64 bit Vista or Windows 7 machines and will take full advantage of your processors speed. Application will launch faster and users will be able to work with larger amounts of data.

Editions: There are as always different versions for you to choose from. Beginning with Starter Edition, which is free, but only offers basic support in Word and Excel and contains advertisements. Finishing with a Professional Plus edition which gives you everything it?s got bar Visio and project 2010.

Upgradeable: Office 2010 can be upgraded at any-time from a limited version to the Pro Plus one. The Home + Student edition will upgrade to Home + business from within Office 2010.

Web Apps: You can now collaborate with friends over the internet, and they don?t even need to have the application themselves. Sharing documents with friends enables them to help with editing on the fly. Web Apps allows you to share any document from the suite so that family or friends can help you out.

Mobile Office 2010: Released concurrently with Office 2010, the mobile suite has been made for Windows Mobile 6.5. A different version will ship with WP7 later in the year.

Mac Edition (Office 2011): Microsoft have promised a full version of Outlook in the Mac 2011 version, this will include .PST file importing, Time Machine and Spotlight support. Office Mac will only be available in a 32-bit version.

You can get a look at it in action here.

Active Directory:
Active Directory will now appear in DPM as a resource available for protection.

Exchange Server:
Support for Exchange 2010
Better support for mailbox level restores (Brick level – previously needed a third party app for this)

Hyper-V:
File level backup and restore of files within guests (Back up the files in a VM thats backed up)
Recover to other Hyper-v nodes
Support of Live Migration clusters

SQL:
Backup full SQL instances
Autodiscover of DBs within these instances (Great if you ad a DB and dont config it to backup, gets done for you)

SharePoint:
Support of new versions of Sharepoint and Office Server (Not sure what yet)
Autodiscovery of new content DBs on certain

What I want to cover very quickly is something that might be of use to any SME with Exchange that has thought about implementing a Highly Available solution. Lets face it, once we heard about clustering.. we all thought.. would that help my business? How difficult is this? and of course.. how much would it cost? No matter what size your business is, email is (for most) absolutley critical and whatever we can do to protect that service from failure is a worthwhile consideration.

Before the advent of HYPER-V, in order to get full redundancy for Exchange Server you would need to have 7 seperate servers. 2 for Active Directory and DNS, 1 For File and print, 2 for Client Access Services and Hub roles and another 2 servers running the mailbox mode in a CCR environment.

Fast forward to today and the exact same level of protection can be delivered with the use of only 3 servers by using Virtualization (Specifically HYPER-V). By anybodys standards thats some kind of improvement.. see the diagram below for the config:

Virtualization is a great buzzword at the moment and has been for a whie now. Whilst many of us know what it is and even how it might be able to help us out in terms of consolidation, cost vs capacity, IT support and of course the age old justification process for when we are buying new kit on which to run these systems. Many people still don’t know a great deal about some of the great tools available for helping us out with the installation and implementation process.

For a while now we have been using a product called System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (Microsoft). We started out using the initial 2007 base product and are currently using the latest SCVMM 2008 R2 release. I have lead most of our virtualization projects here at PhillipsTaylorBrown and have looked at most of the tools available and tried most of them at some point or another (Sometimes with a great deal of frustration!).After using some of the more readily available tools I think its safe to say that with SCVMM 2008 R2.. Microsoft absolutley nailed it, for an off the shelf product they have really done a great job with this one!

Let me tell you why:

one size fits all! – well, its about as close to that as you expect from software. SCVMM works with HYPER-V on windows Server, Windows Server HYPER-V (remember these are 2 different offerings, albeit with the same hypervisor), VMware ESX, ESXi, all the way to vSphere 4 (although not officially supported it seems fine), Microsoft Virtual Server (MSVS). Soon we will have support for Citrix/Xen too! All the major platforms catered for so only one managment and impementation solution required.

Its fast. There are a few tools out there that will work very well in certain situations and are, if we are being honest pretty good and great value for money, but the price you pay is performance. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you have to virtualize a server (or several) holding a lot of data. Then that ‘simple P2V’operation takes hours and hours. What if its mission critical? What if it goes wrong and you have to start over? – SCVMM gets around this by using the volume shadow copy service and as such runs that bit quicker but with the added advantage of not interrupting the source server, making the operation pretty slick with very little (minutes) of downtime.

Not to be confused with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (which is the addon/additional role

Exchange Backup Functionality:
Exchange Server 2007 SP2 includes a new VSS plug-in for Windows Server Backup to support Exchange backups. Once you install SP2 you can use the standard Windows backup tool to backup and restore your Exchnage 2007 databases. The new VSSplugin is a single .EXE file called WBBExchange.exe and is automatically installed by SP2 on all Exchange 2007 Servers with the mailbox role installed.

Enhancments to the Auditing system:
There is a new Exchange Auditing events and audit log repository that allows admins to audit the key events relating to their Exchnage servers more easily. This dedicated audit log repository provides much more granularity and performance over exiting methods.

Public Folder Quota Management:
Added cmdlets now allow for easier management of Public folders. These new cmdlets remove the dependancy on the old public folder distributed authoring and versioning administration tools.

Centralised Organisational Settings:
A number of new cmdlet parameters have been added to assist in the management of a number of Exchange organisation settings, these include the following.

• Add-AvailabilityAddressSpace
• Export-Mailbox
• Import-Mailbox
• Move-Mailbox
• New-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory
• New-ManagedFolder
• Restore-Mailbox
• Set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory
• Set-CASMailbox
• Set-IMAPSettings
• Set-OABVirtualDirectory
• Set-OrganizationConfig
• Set-POPSettings
• Set-PublicFolder
• Set-TransportConfig
• Test-ActiveSyncConnectivity
• Test-OwaConnectivity
• Test-WebServicesConnectivity