Microsoft has just released new versions of its security products for Exchange Server.
The service packs introduce technology that will notify customers of engine changes – including the addition or elimination of engines – and allow administrators to update their engine configurations without having to deploy any new product updates. This update allows customers to accommodate engine changes effortlessly, helping maintain the high level of security provided in the Forefront server security products.
As an example of Microsoft’s commitment to continual improvement of our malware detection leadership, we are investing in new antispam technology through a partnership with Cloudmark that will provide an overall better antispam experience including higher detection rates, lower false positives, and improved submission and service experience. The Cloudmark engine is now included in latest service pack releases of Antigen for Exchange with Antigen Spam Manager 9.0 and Antigen for SMTP Gateways with Antigen Spam Manager 9.0 products as Beta while it undergoes customer trials.
- Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server with Service Pack 2: Forefront Security for Exchange Server integrates multiple scan engines from industry-leading security firms into a comprehensive, layered solution, helping protect your Microsoft Exchange Server messaging environments from viruses, worms, spam, and inappropriate content. Features include antimalware engine amendments and rollup of software fixes.
Note: - Forefront Security for Exchange users who are running Exchange 2007 RTM and wish to upgrade to Exchange 2007 SP1 must first upgrade to Forefront Security for Exchange to the service pack 2 version.
- For more information on antimalware engine amendments, refer to Antimalware Engine Notifications and Developments site
- Microsoft Antigen for Exchange with Antigen Spam Manager with SP2: The Messaging Security Suite includes Antigen for Exchange with Spam Manager, Antigen for SMTP Gateways with Spam Manager, and provides server-level protection against the latest e-mail threats. Features include antimalware engine amendments, support for new antispam engine from Cloudmark and rollup of software fixes.
Note: - Microsoft Antigen for SMTP Gateways with Antigen Spam Manager with SP2: The Messaging Security Suite includes Antigen for Exchange with Spam Manager, Antigen for SMTP Gateways with Spam Manager, and provides server-level protection against the latest e-mail threats. Features include antimalware engine amendments, support for new antispam engine from Cloudmark and rollup of software fixes.
Note:
Related Links:
Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor v14.00.0611.003 is now available to download.
Brief Description
Enables system administrators to view and evaluate individual users' usage and experience with Microsoft Exchange Server.
Overview
Use the Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor to gather real-time data to better understand current client usage patterns, and to plan for future work. Administrators can view several items, including IP addresses used by clients, versions and modes of Microsoft Office Outlook, and resources such as CPU usage, server-side processor latency, and total latency for network and processing. Works with Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, 2003 and 2007.
The registration for Microsoft Tech•Ed Europe 2009 is now open.
This year, the event will occur between 9 and 13 of November in Berlin and will gather, once again, Developers and IT Professionals under the same roof.
Tech·Ed Europe 2009 will be focused into a single week for both the developer and IT professional communities.
The change in format back to a combined event is based on feedback from both our developer and IT professional audiences who in this time of economic uncertainty prefer a single week activity.
For more than 16 years, Tech·Ed Europe has provided our customers the best technical education event in the industry and we look forward to continuing to deliver the great content, education and connection opportunities.
WHAT EVERYONE CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT
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MICROSOFT OFFICE and new ways to maximise business productivity
This year's Office System track will help you deploy, adopt and develop on business productivity applications. Learn about deploying Microsoft Office to your users, building pervasive Microsoft Office SharePoint solutions and managing your work with Microsoft Business Productivity Visio.
WHAT IT PROFESSIONALS CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT
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VIRTUALISATION that helps leverage existing investments
Get an in-depth understanding of today’s low-cost virtualisation technologies and how they can help you make the most of your current software and hardware investments.
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HOSTING for economies of scale
Learn how to take advantage of Microsoft’s hosted services to scale your IT department’s communications and collaboration offering. You’ll also lower your hardware, management and power costs.
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UNIFYING to reduce costs and help increase efficiencies
Truly unified communications create a single communication infrastructure. That means you can reduce costs for PBX enhancements while improving productivity through unified inboxes along with rules that help workers manage interruptions.
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DEPLOYMENT - maximise your existing IT infrastructure and do more with what you've got
In economic times like these, it's important to get maximum value out of your existing IT infrastructure. What you learn at Tech·Ed Europe 2009 can help you ensure that your infrastructure works as efficiently and productively as possible.
Microsoft launched recently the Exchange Server Training Portal, a site with great learning resources for both Exchange Server 2010 and Exchange Server 2007.
As Scott points out, don’t miss the special offer: Clinic 6899: Exploring Features of Exchange Server 2010.
Another great site is Microsoft Learning Snacks:
“Learning Snacks are short, interactive presentations about popular topics created by Microsoft Learning experts. Each Snack is delivered by using innovative Microsoft Silverlight technology and includes various media, such as animations and recorded demos. At the end of each free presentation, you can view more Snacks, learn more about the topic, or visit a related Web site.”
Right now, there are 2 Exchange Server 2010 snacks available:
- High Availability and Storage in Exchange Server 2010: For most organizations, flexible and cost-effective communication tools are important factors for meeting goals such as high availability and enhanced database recovery. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 helps organizations achieve these goals with a simplified, unified framework that helps them lower their costs and enhance business productivity. This Learning Snack explains how mailbox availability is achieved in Exchange server 2010 and how the new and improved database recovery and storage features help organizations manage their Exchange environment better.
- Unified Messaging in Exchange Server 2010: Today, one of the topmost priorities for most organizations is to enable users to communicate and connect with others anytime quickly and easily. To meet this need and at the same time reduce costs, many organizations are now adopting Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 to take advantage of the enhanced unified messaging feature. Unified messaging provides users with flexible and powerful new ways of accessing information and increasing productivity. This Learning Snack explains how unified messaging works and also describes its architecture. In addition, it describes the voice mail integration feature of Exchange Server 2010.
The long-awaited native Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 has finally arrived. The only downside of this MP is it requires OpsMgr 2007 R2, it can’t be used with a previous version.
Brief Description
This Management Pack includes an extensive set of monitoring including synthetic transactions to effectively monitor Exchange 2007 and report on performance, availability, and reliability of its server roles.
Overview
The Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack is designed to monitor Exchange 2007 key health indicators, collect Exchange component-specific performance counters in one central location, and raise alerts for operator intervention as necessary. By detecting, sending alerts, and automatically responding to critical events, this Management Pack helps indicate, correct, and prevent possible service outages or configuration problems, allowing you to proactively manage Exchange servers and identify issues before they become critical. The Management Pack monitors and provides alerts for automatic notification of events indicating service outages, performance degradation, health monitoring, and centralized management.
Note: This Management Pack requires Operations Manager 2007 R2.
Feature Summary
- A number of synthetic transactions ensure the Exchange servers are available and responding in a timely manner. The synthetic transactions are maintenance-mode aware, so that if the target of a transaction is in maintenance mode, the source will not run the transaction, and not alert unnecessarily.
- This Management Pack includes a Management Pack template that provides a wizard-like interface for configuring synthetic transactions against Outlook Web Access (OWA), Exchange ActiveSync, Web Services, POP3, and IMAP.
- This Management Pack includes a Management Pack template that provides a wizard-like interface for configuring mail flow synthetic transactions between agent-managed Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers.
- This Management Pack provides 30+ reports specific to Exchange 2007 that track availability and performance compared to service level objectives. For the list of reports and for more information about the reports, see the Management Pack Guide.
- All the synthetic transactions in this Management Pack use an Operations Manager 2007 R2 hosting feature for Windows PowerShell technology that provides a performance improvement when running synthetic transactions.
- A significant number of rules and monitors that are not actionable or may be noisy are disabled. Note that many of these rules are still in the Management Pack so that you can enable them if necessary.
- Support for monitoring any number of Exchange organizations using a single Operations Manager 2007 management group.
- Full support for Microsoft clustered configurations. For more details, see the Management Pack Guide.
- Discovery of Exchange 2007 server roles is disabled by default, and no Exchange 2007 monitoring is applied by default. This allows you to discover and monitor your servers gradually, as well as tune the Management Pack as you bring more agent-managed Exchange 2007 servers into the Operations Manager environment.
Microsoft has recently released the June update for the Outlook 2003/2007 Junk E-mail Filter.
"This update provides the Junk E-mail Filter in Microsoft Office Outlook with a more current definition of which e-mail messages should be considered junk e-mail."
The update is available for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 or you can use Microsoft Update. As usual the update comes with the corresponding Knowledge Base article:
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The July edition of TechNet Magazine is now available online or, if you prefer, you can download as an HTML Help .chm file for offline reading.
The cover highlights the article about managing Active Directory with Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007. Although this is a subject that concerns most of the Messaging Administrators, there are 2 other articles that are more “Exchange-specific”: Utility Spotlight Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer and Exchange Q & A New Features and Improvements in Exchange Server 2010.
The You Had Me At EHLO blog have a nice list of upcoming Exchange 2010 TechNet sessions:
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 High Availability (Level 300)
Monday, June 01, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: Welcome to the future! The future of Exchange high availability, that is. In this webcast, we reveal the changes and improvements to the built-in high availability platform in Exchange Server 2010. Exchange 2010 includes a unified framework for high availability and disaster recovery that is quick to deploy and easy to manage. Learn about all of the new features in Exchange 2010 that make it the most resilient, highly available version of Exchange ever.
Presenter: Scott Schnoll, Principal Technical Writer, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Overview (Level 200)
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: This webcast will introduce you to Exchange Server 2010, reviewing the major areas of investment for this release and highlighting marquee
features.
Presenter: Angi Livermore, Tech Solution Prof – Core UC, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Management Tools (Level 300)
Monday, June 08, 2009 1:00 PM Pacific Time
Event Overview: Exchange 2010 includes new capabilities that make the operation of your Exchange environment more efficient. Learn how we’ve made the Exchange Management Console more powerful, extended the reach of PowerShell, and made it easier to delegate management tasks.
Presenter: Evan Dodds, US-Exchange Shared PM, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Archiving and Retention (Level 300)
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: This webcast will introduce new ways to address archiving and retention with Exchange Server 2010.
Presenter: Harold Wong, Senior IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Outlook Web Access (Level 200)
Monday, June 15, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: Exchange 2010 brings new features and functionality to Outlook Web Access. See product demonstrations of the latest capabilities and understand how browser-based communication and collaboration gets better than ever in Exchange 2010.
Presenter: Gary Danoys, Tech Solution Prof – Core UC, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Architecture (Level 300)
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: This webcast describes the overall architecture of Exchange 2010 and key considerations for the scalability and performance of each server role. This webcast will provide the background and framework for the other Exchange 2010 webcasts, serving as a bridge between the overview session and drill-downs in each product area. This session is a recommended pre-requisite for the Exchange 2010 deployment and migration webcast.
Presenter: Ross Smith, ITOE Senior IP Tech Architect, Exchange, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Federation in Exchange 2010 (Level 300)
Monday, June 22, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: Federation is a key part of the architecture of Exchange 2010, powering new organization-to-organization sharing scenarios. Learn how federation enhances the capabilities of Exchange 2010 and enables advanced coexistence between Exchange Server and Exchange Online.
Presenter: Paul Tischhauser, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Voice Mail enabled by Unified Messaging (Level 300)
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging is Microsoft’s second generation unified messaging and voice mail solution. In this webcast, learn about the features, benefits, and architecture of Unified Messaging in Exchange 2010.
Presenter: Michael Wilson, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Information Protection and Control (Level 300)
Monday, June 29, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: This webcast will introduce you to new ways to address information protection and control with Exchange Server 2010. A discussion of the use of encryption and rights management in parallel with Exchange will be included as well as an introduction to new functionality in Exchange that supports information protection scenarios.
Presenter: Harold Wong, Senior IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Transition and Deployment (Level 300)
Wednesday, July 01, 2009 9:00 AM Pacific Time
Event Overview: In this session we will cover the migration planning and deployment path to move an organization from Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010.
Presenter: Kristian Andaker, Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Meanwhile, while reading Henrik Walther Blog, I noticed there are some cool sessions from TechEd USA that are now available to the general public:
Microsoft released recently Security Advisory 971492, which alerts for a vulnerability in Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0, 5.1 and 5.0 (7.0 is not affected), that can allow elevation of privilege.
The vulnerability only occurs when WebDAV is enabled. Since Exchange Server 2003 uses WebDAV to service users, these servers are potentially at risk.
To find out whether a specific server is using WebDAV or whether it’s not, you can use the method Jane Lewis describes on her blog.
To mitigate the risk, follow the procedures described in Microsoft Security Advisory 971492.
Related Links:
[UPDATE]
According to the Security Research and Defense blog, OWA is not affected:
Question: Is Outlook Web Access (OWA) vulnerable to the authentication bypass?
Answer: No, OWA is not vulnerable to this vulnerability. Exchange 2007 and earlier supported the WebDAV protocol but they did so with an Exchange implementation of WebDAV which only reads/write to/from the Exchange store. It does not interact with the filesystem directly.
Microsoft My Phone, which provides back up and restore service of Windows Mobile phone's information to the “cloud” is now available to the general public.
The service is still in Beta but, as a regular user, I can guarantee it works really smoothly on my phone.
Microsoft My Phone syncs information on your mobile phone to a storage space on a web site hosted by Microsoft. If your phone is lost or stolen, or if you upgrade to a new phone, you can easily restore the contacts, calendar appointments, photos, and other information that you stored on My Phone to a compatible new or replacement phone. Most phones that run the Windows Mobile 6 operating system are compatible with My Phone service.
Microsoft My Phone enables you to view and manage phone information by using a web browser. In your web account, you can add, edit, and delete contacts and calendar appointments, and the changes will appear on your phone the next time that you sync.
My Phone makes it easy to view photos on your computer that were taken with your camera phone. From your web account, you can save photos to your computer or can e-mail them to family and friends.
How much does the Microsoft My Phone service cost?
Microsoft does not charge a fee for the My Phone service at this time. But the data plan you have with your mobile operator may require you to pay data-transfer charges when you use the service. If you are unsure of your plan coverage, please contact your mobile operator.
How much data can I back up?
Your Microsoft My Phone account gives you 200 MB of free storage on the Microsoft My Phone web site. If a synchronization would result in exceeding this limit, you will receive an error message on your phone and your account on the My Phone web site will only include information received prior to reaching this limit. Any files in excess of this limit will not be saved.
The Update Rollup 8 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 was released.
Overview
Update Rollup 8 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) resolves issues that were found in Exchange Server 2007 SP1 since the software was released. This update rollup is highly recommended for all Exchange Server 2007 SP1 customers.
For a list of changes that are included in this update rollup, see KB968012.
This update rollup does not apply to Exchange Server 2007 Release To Manufacturing (RTM). For a list of update rollups applicable to Exchange Server 2007 RTM, refer to the section Update rollups for Exchange Server 2007 RTM in the Knowledge Base article KB937052.
This is a cumulative update rollup and replaces the following:
- KB945684 Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB945684)
- KB948016 Update Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB948016)
- KB949870 Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB949870)
- KB952580 Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB952580)
- KB953467 Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB953467)
- KB959241 Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB959241)
- KB960384 Update Rollup 7 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB960384)
System Requirements
- Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-Bit x86); Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 editions; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 x64 Edition; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 2
- Exchange Server 2007 SP1 must be installed prior to installing this update rollup.
- This update rollup cannot be installed if you are using Exchange Server 2007 RTM.
- Any Interim Updates for Exchange Server 2007 must be uninstalled prior to installing this update rollup.
- 32-bit editions of Windows Server 2003 with SP2, Windows Server 2003 R2 with SP2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista and Windows XP with SP2 are only supported for Exchange Server 2007 management tools.
Some important notes from the You Had Me At EHLO blog:
As in the previous rollups, we have done a mix of product improvements (aka Critical Design Change Requests) and bug fixes. A few key ones which I would like to call out are as follows:
- KB 969690 - We have fixed the bug introduced in Update Rollup 7 which caused the sender of the Delivery Status Notification (DSN) to be unresolved.
- Disable kernel mode authentication in Windows Server 2008 for CAS servers - As documented here, it was required to manually take the additional step to configure the CAS servers running Windows Server 2008 to disable kernel mode authentication. Starting this rollup, the installer will configure this for you.
- X-Header promotion to named properties- Change to the way X-headers are promoted to named properties. More on this in Jason Nelson's blog post Named Properties, X-Headers, and You.
- KB 961606 - We have fixed a bug where Outlook Web Access (OWA) users may find that the font size of plain text messages is extremely small on third-party Web browsers.
I have just installed it on my lab (Hyper-V) machines and all went well!
Links:
Microsoft released recently the following KB Article: Outlook Tools: description of sample tools for managing PST files in your Outlook Profile.
The article describes the following three tools:
- Getpst.exe - The Getpst.exe tool allows you retrieve information about the existing services (PST files) in a given e-mail profile. It is possible to retrieve information about all ANSI PST files, all UNICODE PST files, or both file types.
- Addpst.exe - The Addpst.exe tool allows you to add PST services (PST files) to a given e-mail profile. You can add either new or existing PST files to the profile. The file will be created at the specified file location. The PST file can be either in ANSI format (Outlook 97-2002 Personal Folders File) or UNICODE format (Office Outlook Personal Folders File).
- Delpst.exe - The Delpst.exe tool allows you remove services (PST files) from a given email profile. It is possible to remove all ANSI files, all UNICODE PST files, or all files of both types.
“An Outlook personal folders file (.pst) is a file that is commonly used to store e-mail messages for Internet e-mail accounts (POP3/IMAP), for archiving e-mail messages from an Exchange mailbox, or for organizing e-mail messages using rules that move the messages based on some criteria. If you are managing users in a company environment you occasionally need to manage .pst files in users’ Outlook profiles. This includes, but is not limited to the following actions.
- Add a new or existing .pst to the profile
- Remove a .pst file from the profile
- Retrieve information about .pst files in the profile
In order to help automate these three activities related to .pst files, sample tools are now available for download and use from the Microsoft Download site. This article provides information about these tools -- how to download them and how to use them on an Outlook client.”
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The June edition of TechNet Magazine is now available online or, if you prefer, you can download as an HTML Help .chm file for offline reading.
The capital letters of the cover, “IT’S ALL GOTTA WORK”, take us to the main subject of this issue: application compatibility and how to deal with those critical applications that can prevent the upgrade to the latest and greatest operating system provided by Microsoft.
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