Interestingly, Exchange 2010 SP2 later this year!

Written by Praveen

Thursday, 28 April 2011 21:39

I know we still have been testing on SP1 and its possibilities and capabilities. You do not have to wait for long time, now get ready and read more about the new features that we can expect in the next version of Exchange 2010 Service Pack (SP2). There is a blog from Tony Redmond about few enhancements in Exchange 2010 SP2, expected to release by end of this year. There are three major changes/additions of features in new service pack, which are,

Address Book Policies (ABPs), also known as “GAL segmentation”
Hybrid co-existence
Device overload

In the entire above features, I feel the Address Book Policies (ABP) will be used widely. ABP also like the other policies (OWA, Active Sync), now administrator can decide what object in the GAL can be viewed by a user. As like other policies it also have the default policy which will allow the user to see the GAL without any filtrations. Now with the GAL Segmentation, you can create department, Location GAL etc. If you would like to more on this area, see the exchange team blog written by Kevin(Exchange's General Manager).

Hybrid co-existence, as the name explains it gives us an option to share the data between On Premises and Cloud with Office 365. It is even possible today, but with lot more administrative efforts. Exchange 2010 SP2 will have Wizard to reduce the overhead.

Device Overload, the name is a little bit confusing. But actually yes it is to help the administrators to troubleshoot the mobile devices. Recently we have all seen issue with mobile device like blackberry, Android, Apple and Microsoft with the recurring MRs and duplicate messages. It gives a new Active Sync lab to help improve interoperability between devices produced by different vendors mentioned previously.

If you are interested to know more about the features, I would recommend you to see below articles.

Tony Redmond Article

Exchange Blog Article by Kevin

Update(6th Dec 2011):

As promised, Microsoft has now released the Service Pack 2 for Exchange Server 2010! Click below link to know more about this release,

Ready for Download, Exchange Server 2010 SP2

-Praveen