At Ignite training, I was fortunate enough to have several friends in the training as well.  We got to hang and catch up.

Butch (my roommate during Ranger training)

Tuan and I
 

Tuan, Hank, and I

Jaclynn dropped me off at the airport

On the way back to NJ, I met Ja Rule in the Airport

Also Patrick Ewing was there, but he was with his daughter and for obvious reasons didn’t want to be disturbed.  I swear this pic is him.  We were both moving and my old point and shoot is too sloooow!

-Allen

This past week, I was in Orlando for Exchange 14 Ignite training.  This consisted of hands-on labs and presentations from Microsoft employees about the next version of Exchange.  While we were at the training, Microsoft unveiled the official title for Exchange 14, Exchange 2010.  There are some great new features.

• Database Availability Group (DAG) – allows database replication without a lot of the complexity that existed in Exchange 2007.  The nice thing about this is you can have a server with multiple roles and have a DAG.
• Self-healing databases – if there are multiple copies of a database (in a DAG array) Exchange now has the capability to recover from page errors in the database (-1018, –1019, and –1022).  A copy of the bad page can be copied from another database copy.
• Exchange Federation Gateway – This allows organizations to use a broker service provided by Microsoft in the cloud to authenticate cross-organization.  From this people can view Free/Busy information and even details.
• Decreased IO footprint – Exchange 2010 has the potential to reduce IO by 70% over Exchange 2007 and a total of 91% over Exchange 2003.  This is great news which can lead to larger mailboxes.
• Online mailbox moves – that’s right!  Now user’s do not have to be kicked out of their mailbox while it is being moved.

There are plenty of other features, but this is just a quick taste.  Overall, I feel that there are several features which warrant this upgrade from Exchange 2003 and even Exchange 2007.

Check out more details at: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/

-Allen