Since the Tech Ed announcements many have been asking for more details. Last Friday's CTP should quench the thirst of those wanting to know more. Get your copy by following the link at the references section, otherwise read on to see what changed at the Exchange System Manager.

My installation went smooth. The most note worthy point being the need to uninstall the Intelligent Message Filter. This was replaced by the new IMF which will now become an integral part of Exchange, rather than an optional component.

The area attracting most buzz in the previous weeks was certainly the extended support to mobile devices. The configuration under Global Settings | Mobile Services hosts the new options. Here are the Direct Push and Device Security settings:

The message hygiene area is where you will see most configuration changes. Under Global Settings | Message Delivery, the General property page enables the configuration of the perimeter and internal IP ranges. This is what will enable the new IMF to be deployed on internal servers.

Under Message Delivery there is also the Sender ID Filtering configuration page. Here handling of Sender ID validation failures is configurable. The choice includes Accepting, Deleting or Rejecting emails. On accepting, the Sender ID result is passed to IMF. This is then combined with the IMF processing result to determine the final SCL rating.

Yet another change is the enablement of IMF. Currently IMF installs a dedicated object under the SMTP Protocol for this purpose. With SP2 this object is gone. IMF is enabled through the SMTP Virtual Server at General | Advanced | Edit. The dialog that used to enable Connection, Sender and Recipient Filtering, is now extended to also enable Sender ID and IMF.

Finally for those forgetting that this is just a preview, selecting the properties for the server object will serve as a reminder. The new Assign Banner page deforms the size of this property sheet plus that some text is clearly missing.

While we are at the server object, the General property sheet shows the build number (7623) and the extra space caused by the Assign Banner page.

References

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 SP2 Community Technology Preview