Well Tech Ed 2009 has been and gone, I tried to attend a variety of sessions while I was there…but I found I was attending more Exchange 2010 sessions then any of the other tracks provided. Mainly because what’s coming in Exchange 2010 is so damn exciting.
First of the ESE has had it’s schema completely re-written…apparently it took acouple of the Exchange team’s best developers 3 years of solid work to re-do the schema. This has resulted in any data being written to the database to be written in a sequential fashion now instead of randomly like Exchange 2007. A downside of the schema re-write means that we loose single instance storage but iOPs has been significantly reduced.
A flow on effect of the schema re-write is the new High Availability features…this is really cool. No more clustering, no more CCR or LCR we now have Database Availability Groups (DAGs)…yes I know shocking acronym MS…I’ll do a proper post about this when I’ve bundle some resources together to share but it’s pretty exciting the concept of Database Level failover clearly makes Exchange the number one messaging platform going around.
Also new in 2010 is the concept of mailbox item archiving…we do away with those wonderful things called PSTs (note sarcasm). The idea sounds great but I’m not sure if I’m a fan of the mechanics of it at this stage, some more research on my behalf is prolly required. Unified Messaging has also received a boost, the UM box will now do text translations of voicemails so you can quickly browse over voicemails when actually listening to them is not appropriate at the time. Faxing support has been dropped…who uses faxes now days anyway…
Just a quick post to let you know that blog is still alive…I’ll do a detialed post on the new HA features in 2010 soon. Oh BTW great sessions from all of the Exchange guys at Tech Ed, specialy Scott Schnoll…that dude has a crazy amount of knowledge.
Cheers
