REDMOND, Wash., June 25, 2001 — With the release of Exchange 2000, Microsoft Corp. provided IT professionals with a reliable and easy-to-manage platform for messaging and collaboration that allowed knowledge workers to continually connect with people and information. Today, Microsoft® Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is available and offers additional functionality, so customers planning upgrades can kick their deployments into high gear. With SP1, Exchange 2000 customers also receive Outlook® 2002, the newest release of the premier messaging and collaboration client, that enables knowledge workers to better manage their e-mail and personal information.
“SP1 marks another milestone in the life cycle of Exchange 2000,”
said Kevin McCuistion, group product manager for Exchange at Microsoft.
“For the 60 percent already planning and deploying Exchange 2000, SP1 will accelerate their deployment efforts with additional migration tools, enhanced security and higher availability. For other Exchange 5.5, Notes and GroupWise customers, the release of SP1 represents a great time to kick-start their plans.”
Migration Made Easy
The Exchange 2000 Migration Wizard allows customers to consolidate multiple servers running Exchange 5.5, as well as competitive products such as Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, to fewer Exchange 2000 servers. With Exchange 2000 SP1, the Migration Wizard now facilitates migration from multiple Exchange 5.5 systems into a single Exchange 2000 system. This is especially helpful for customers undergoing mergers and acquisitions.
“The updated Migration Wizard helped Avaya expedite our migration to Exchange 2000 by moving 27,000 mailboxes in just six weeks,”
said Andy Ferguson, chief architect for Personal Computing Infrastructure at Avaya Corp.
The Notes and GroupWise Free/Busy Calendar Connectors will help customers migrating from Lotus or Novell messaging systems. These calendar connectors will keep users connected as their mailboxes are migrated to Exchange 2000. Each Calendar Connector works bidirectionally, so users of Notes or GroupWise can access free/busy calendar information for Exchange and Outlook users, and vice versa.
Improved Resistance to Viruses
Thanks to a new virus-scanning API, VSAPI 2.0, third-party virus-scanning vendors including Trend Micro Inc., McAfee (NAI), Panda Software, and Symantec Corp. are delivering this week more robust solutions for the market. VSAPI 2.0 performs improved scans of Internet content and delivers reports on the sender and receiver of a virus.
Customers get the best defense when they combine Exchange 2000 SP1 with the new anti-virus features in Outlook 2002, which is included with the SP1 kit. Outlook 2002 boasts a built-in e-mail screening function that scans all incoming and outgoing messages for potentially harmful attachments and doesn’t allow those attachments to be opened. Outlook will also notify users when a foreign program is attempting to breach their address book.
Richer Client Experiences
Outlook Web Access is fast becoming a primary tool for mobile workers to access their e-mail, calendar, contacts and collaborative information from any Internet-connected PC. Additional languages — Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Swedish and Turkish — are supported, as well as display of week numbers for European customers. SP1 also adds new functionality, including attachments in public folders, a richer user experience on UNIX workstations and deleted-item recovery.
“With Portuguese-language support in Service Pack 1, we are able to launch our ISP and ASP messaging infrastructure and potentially reach up to a million customers,”
said Nuno Almeida e Silva, messaging program manager for Telecel Vodafone Portugal.
“We’ll also be able to provide wireless access to Exchange accounts with Mobile Information Server which requires Service Pack 1.”
Knowledge workers can also increase their productivity and performance with Outlook 2002. Exchange 2000 customers are able to take advantage of new Outlook features unique to Exchange, such as built-in content indexing and searching, improved calendaring, faster online/offline performance, and integrated instant messaging.
Mailbox Manager
Companies can use Mailbox Manager to enforce corporate e-mail retention policies by regularly deleting messages that match predefined rules. Some of the features of Mailbox Manager include scheduled operations, retention policies for individual folders, deletion by message age or size and administrative reports.
“Overall, Service Pack 1 will make our Exchange 2000 environment more stable,”
said Thomas McCormick, IT consultant, Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLP, America’s fifth-largest refiner with offices and operations in 21 states.
“Our biggest day-to-day headache is disk capacity. With Mailbox Manager we can help employees manage their electronic data more efficiently so they can be more productive. That also means we don’t have to spend extra money buying extra disk space for storage.”
Additional features in Exchange 2000 SP1
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Datacenter support for higher availability. With SP1, Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server is now certified on Windows® 2000 Datacenter Server, providing Exchange customers with the highest level of availability. The service pack enhances clustering capabilities by introducing support for up to four-node clustering. This enables organizations to run full loads on servers and maximize uptime when system failures occur, thereby minimizing the impact on users and their business.
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Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server improvements. SP1 enhancements enable users to schedule conferences from a browser. The new Web Scheduler allows users who aren’t running Outlook to schedule public and private conferences with the direct booking of conferencing resources. Web Scheduler also allows anonymous users to schedule a public conference.
Exchange 2000 SP1 is an important component of Microsoft’s commitment to delivering high-quality customer support. While developing SP1, Microsoft relied on feedback from customers and Microsoft Product Support Services. The result is a collection of fixes that continue to increase the reliability of Exchange 2000 and assure customers that their servers are up to date.
“Risks associated with deploying major product upgrades can be minimized by waiting until the first or second service pack is released before moving into production,”
said Maurene Caplan Grey, senior research analyst at Gartner Inc.
“Service packs will include fixes for problems discovered after the initial upgrade was released, as well as new features, such as management utilities.”
Availability
Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1 is available worldwide today via the Web. The download is available to customers at: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2000/sp1.asp . North American customers can also call (800) 360-7561 to order SP1. The order includes three CDs: Exchange 2000 Service Pack 1, Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2001 for Mac.
About Exchange 2000
Microsoft Exchange 2000 is the easy-to-manage messaging and collaboration platform that provides e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging, conferencing and services for custom collaborative solutions that bring people and information together any time, anywhere. Exchange 2000 delivers enhanced reliability, scalability, manageability and performance with a lower total cost of ownership.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
Microsoft, Outlook and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
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