Microsoft have announced that the new high availability feature of Exchange 2010, namely, Database Availability Group, or DAG will be available in Exchange Standard edition. This is yet another great way they are helping make high availability affordable and appealing to smaller customers.

It is also worth mentioning though that since a DAG makes use of Windows Failover Clustering (WFC) included with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition, this Windows Server edition is still required.

For more info see this UC Blog post

For more info on DAG’s, click here

Microsoft have got a webcast coming up next week to discuss recommendations for virtualizing Exchange server and the benefits of using Hyper-V + System Center for virtualization.

The webcast is on Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 10am Pacific time, which is Thursday, Nov 5 at 5am for those in Sydney.

For more information and to register for the webcast, click here

The Exchange Team have released an updated version of the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer

The tool simulates several client logon and mail flow scenarios. When a test fails, many of the errors have troubleshooting tips to assist you in correcting the problem. You may recall reading about it before..

Some new features include:

• Updated user interface
• New CAPTCHA implementation
• Updated the Outlook Anywhere test logic to work with Exchange 2010
• Added a password confirmation text box to ensure the proper password was entered before running a test. This will reduce the number of tests that fail simply due to a typo in the password.

 

Additional tests include:

• Exchange Web Services - This allows you to perform connectivity testing for Exchange Web Services client such as Entourage. Developers can also use the Service Account Verification test to ensure things are configured and working properly for access with an alternate account or Exchange Impersonation.
• Outbound SMTP - Performs Reverse DNS testing, DNS RBL Checks, and SenderID validation against a provided "outbound" IP address

 

That’s right, you have not misread the heading.. not the kind of thing you would expect to see on here, right?.. Before you ask, I have not lost my mind, well.. not entirely.. today is Blog Action Day '09 and this year’s topic is Climate Change so I thought I would try to talk about that a little. I’ll be the first to admit that I am no expert on the subject, I don’t drive a Prius and I don’t always remember to take my own shopping bags when I go shopping.

We've all seen the lists right? “25 Ways to Help Curb Climate Change”, etc.. etc and these usually contain things like “Recycle your newspaper” and “Take the bus as often as possible”. Firstly, who still reads the newspaper? we geeks are all about RSS feeds and Kindle’s anyway and if you live in a city, chances are you already take the bus daily.. don’t get me wrong, I think these little tips are important, but, I think its time some of these get revised.

I am a great believer that technological innovation will contribute significantly to reducing the effects of climate change. Other factors, like population growth on the other hand is often overlooked in this debate. Continuous population growth and an expected increase of 2.3 billion people on the planet by 2050 is multiplying the impacts of climate change. Perhaps greater access to family planning is the key? in fact, according to a London School Of Economics study, money spent on contraception is five times more efficient than money spent on clean energy technologies.

Lets look at little ways technology can help. LCD monitors.. not only do they look cooler and take up less room on your desk, they use less than half the power of a traditional CRT.

One of my personal favourites is Blackle. “Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search”. But why? here’s why.. An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. lets do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Google gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode on a CRT monitor, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8 300 kilowatt-hours per day, or about 3 000 000 kilowatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000.

If you are reading this off my actual blog (not via RSS) you are probably looking around right about now and thinking something along the lines of “this site is not black!” well, yeah.. and I don't get 200 million hits a day either, if i did, it would probably be black.. black is the new white after all.

Other links:

• Cisco EnergyWise
• Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year
• Blog Action Day

The Exchange product team have announced that Exchange 2010 is Code Complete and they are looking to launch at Tech·Ed Europe 2009 in early November.

Congrats guys, great effort!

I was looking for a good reference of AD and Exchange schema version numbers yesterday and thought it would be handy to combine all the bits of information I came across into a single post.

There are a couple of ways to find the schema version number, I prefer using “DSQuery” to “ADSIEdit” so I’ll be making use of “DSQuery” in the following examples.

To determine the version of your AD schema, we use “DSQuery” to find the value of the “objectVersion” attribute:

dsquery * cn=schema,cn=configuration,dc=yourdomain,dc=local -scope base –attr objectVersion

Here is a mapping between the “objectVersion” attribute value and the AD schema version:

 

To determine the version of your Exchange schema, we use “DSQuery” to find the value of the “rangeUpper” attribute:

dsquery * CN=ms-Exch-Schema-Version-Pt,cn=schema,cn=configuration,dc=yourdomain,dc=local -scope base –attr rangeUpper

Here is a mapping between the “rangeUpper” attribute value and the Exchange schema version:

 

NOTE: in both examples, it is assumed that your domain name is “youdomain.local”

Having attended Tech-ed Australia last week, I cant help but echo my friend and colleague Craig's thoughts. Infact, I thought I would repost something from his blog. The original post can be viewed here

Last week I attended TechEd Australia in the Gold Coast.  I had a great time learning, connecting, talking, networking, teaching, socialising and presenting.  Having said that I left the Gold Coast both drained and a bit frustrated.

While there was a lot of content there, there was an awful lot of content that was not there.  I was lucky to be one of the speakers in the UC track.  There were 12 sessions allocated for the UC track.  Nine were focused on Exchange 2010 and three went to OCS 2007 R2.  Now, granted, Exchange is a flagship product and 2010 is an exciting release.  I would not take anything away from Exchange.  But OCS 2007 R2 needed much more coverage.  Rewind a year to TechEd 2007 and all the OCS 2007 R2 content was still under embargo so the result of the lack of sessions at TechEd 2009 is that R2 content has not really had a good airing at a large public conference in Australia.

This is not due to a lack of speakers – I submitted two other sessions that did not make the cut.  I know other external speakers who put sessions forward that did not get a slot at all.  I know the Microsoft UC guys could of done more sessions.  Nor is it due to a lack of things to talk about.  In pulling together content for our overview session Derrick Buckley and I drew content and inspiration from no fewer that 5 TechEd US sessions!  Oh the detail we could of gone into if we had had the time.  Edge Services, Conferencing Solutions, Group Chat Architecture and UC Applications could all easily be sessions in their own right.

So if we need more room in the UC track (among others) and we can’t trim back on the existing content because we need that too, what’s the solution.  Simple really.  TechEd Australia should be five days long, like the one in the US is.

Now, I know that events cost money and extending TechEd Australia to five days would not come cheap – but there must be a way.  One suggestion I would put forward would be to combine TechEd Australia and TechEd  New Zealand into one ANZ event.  Surely it would be cheaper to run one event for 4000-5000 people than two for 2500 each.  Also with fewer flights and nights of accommodation for the US speakers that hit Australia and New Zealand perhaps we could get more US speakers out here for the same money?  More days, more colleagues, more experts and more content.  It sounds like a winner to me.

Now – in reality this would probably mean canning TechEd NZ and just having one in Australia since there are no venues in NZ big enough to host an event that size.  I use to live in NZ and I would of crossed the Tasman to attend TechEd in Australia if need be, but I’m sure there will be plenty of naysayers.  Even now, if NZ builds a venue I would happily cross the ditch in the other direction to attend an ANZ TechEd in New Zealand.

I tweeted this thought the other day and got a few comments back from people who thought two more days would be great if their livers could hold out.  What say you Microsoft?

Today I attended the SEC208 session with Jamie Sharp which really provided a great overview of Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG). If you use and like ISA server, you’ll love TMG.

Some of the great new things we can look forward to are web filtering, URL filtering and it also has built in Exchange Edge Server functionality which means if you have an Exchange Edge Server role deployed and also use ISA server, you can now consolidate these into a single server. Another cool thing is, like Exchange Server 2010, TMG will only be available in 64bit.

TMG is currently available as beta3, click here to download it. It is expected to be RTM towards the end of the year.

If you are attending tech-ed, make sure you get your Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) account setup.. I have been most impressed by BPOS.

What's BPOS? click here

So you’ve arrived in the Gold Coast, checked in, unpacked, visited the gym and checked out the pool (right?) now what? I was planning which sessions to attend over the next few days and thought it would be a good idea write a post about it.

Firstly, I would definitely recommend that you get to registration as soon as possible to avoid the rush! Registration will be open until 9pm tonight and then again from 7am tomorrow morning. Once registered you can also pick up your HP Mini Notebook (of course I am writing this post on it!), there is an “unpacking area” in the convention centre if you would like to dispose of the box and packaging.

There is a welcome reception at the exhibition hall betweenn 6pm and 9pm and the opening keynote is tomorrow at 08:15am. All this info is in the mini-guide.

As far as sessions go, here are some of the ones I am looking forward to attending:

Wednesday:

09:45am – 11:00am UNC201 - Introduction to Exchange 2010 with Johann Kruse and Roger Lawrence

11:30am – 12:45pm UNC302 - Exchange 2010 Architecture with Scott Schnoll

 

Thursday:

08:15am – 09:30am UNC305 - Exchange 2010 Voicemail with Mario D'Silva

5:00pm – 6:15pm UNC309 - OCS 2007 R2: Overview & Architecture with Derrick Buckley and Craig Pringle

 

Friday:

08:15am – 09:30am SEC310 - IAG... the success story with Jean-Pierre Simonis

11:30am – 12:45pm – UNC311 - Telephony in OCS R2 with Brendan Carius and John Smith

 

There are of course other events going on, one of which is Sydney UC and Melbourne OCS User Group get together on Thursday. click here for more info

Cant make it to tech-ed this year? no need for tears… many sessions are available on live meeting, click here for more info

and finally, yes, of course I will be tweeting all week! be sure to follow me on twitter!