I dont know about the rest of you, but for me it was a great Christmas gift! The new features that SP2 brings will be good for many of us, especially those that wish to run Office 365 in the cloud.
So new features? Here we go...
- Hybrid Configuration Wizard
- Now we can run seamless between on-premise Exchange & Office 365! YAY!
- Introduction of ABP (Address Book Policies)
- Now organizations can have separation for on-premise diparate GALs. Not exactly sure who would need this, anyone got any comments on it?
- Cross-Site Silent Redirection for OWA
- In a nutshell some organizations have multiple CAS servers. When these CAS servers are in a different AD Site there were challenges around getting users to connect to the best server. Now this occurs seamlessly to the end user, if an end user in site A connects to a CAS in site B he will automatically be redirected to the CAS in site A and never even know he had been moved! Big win here MS, good job! Now lets see if the theory is truly reality.
- Mini Version of OWA
- Some places you may access your mail from via OWA will have restrictions on browser settings that dont play nice with OWA, or from some smart phones or devices.
- URL is: https://webmail.acme.com
/owa/oma users MUST type this in, no redirection is available or configurable to detect anything and automatically fire up OMA. - Those of us with NO-IP like services can fix the limitation, we can create a redirect like "minimail.acme
.com" and have it point to the URL mention above. - Mailbox Replication Service
- In Exchange 2010 SP1, if you wanted to move mailboxes from on-premises to Outlook.com or to another forest, you had to enable MRSProxy on the remote Client Access server. To do this, you had to manually configure the web.config file on every Client Access server. In Exchange 2010 SP2, two parameters have been added to the New-WebServicesVirtualDirectory and Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory cmdlets so that you don't have to perform the manual configuration: MRSProxyEnabled and MaxMRSProxyConnections.
- Mailbox Auto-Mapping
- FINALLY! Now we can Auto-Map a user to a mailbox in which they are granted FULL permissions! Now Outlook will Auto-Map these boxes via Autodiscover! Nice job MS!!
- Multi-Valued Custom Atributes
- Now MS has added ExtensionCustomAttribute1 to 5, each one can hold 1,300 values (wow!) and we can specify the values in a comma-delimited list.
- If anyone has a use for this I would love to hear back on it!!
- Litigation Hold
- FINALLY! Prior to SP2 we could NOT disable or remove a box that was in "litigation hold". Now we can use the switch "IgnoreLegalHold" to bypass this. Thank you thank you!
Exchange SP2 contains all SP1 information & SP1 Rollup Packages 1-6.
You can go from a base Exchange 2010 install straight to SP2 without having to do each unique update in order. Keeping in mind the pre-req's for SP1 and ALWAYS make sure your Windows Server install is FULLY up to date when installing an Exchange SP. Many pre-reqs come in via Windows Updates, not to mention any un-documented compatibility problems that require updates prior to installing SP2.
I've already installed and played with SP2 and there's even some performance improvements as well it would seem.
ALWAYS Take a snapshot of your VM before doing an SP installed (for those of you running Exchange virtually). If you are NOT running Exchange virtually, well I sincerely hope your backup solution can roll-back Exchange.
Download Exchange 2010 SP2 HERE
Microsofts Info on SP2 HERE
