Q: With Exchange 2007, there was initially a lot of resistance to Windows PowerShell and the idea of Exchange management through the command-line or scripting. Do you have a sense of what users are saying now? Have they become accustomed to PowerShell in Exchange? How does remote PowerShell in Exchange 2010 affect this picture?
McClean: What we're seeing now is the use of PowerShell both across Exchange and across other products is growing, so people are certainly becoming more comfortable with the concept of managing a server using PowerShell. But we've tried to put as many of the common tasks into the GUI as possible. So whether it's the Exchange Management Console or whether it's the Exchange Control Panel, the majority of the work can be done with some sort of GUI management tool.
But because all of those tools use remote PowerShell on the back end, we've also allowed you to do things in the Exchange Management Console where you can see what command is going to run so that if you do want to use that command later as part of a script, or you want to understand what's happening, you have the power to do that. We've made some enhancements to the Exchange Management Console this time around to make that easier. In fact, there's a PowerShell log that will log everything that happens in Exchange Management Console so you can actually see what's going on. We've tried to make it easier for people to make that link between the two if they need to go to PowerShell to do anything that they've been doing through the GUI tools.
From a remote PowerShell point of view, two things make that very powerful. You're able to manage, for example, additional Exchange forests through the Exchange Management Console now. And that's made possible because the connection is made through remote PowerShell. So you can make this remote connection and manage more than one forest, for example, through the Exchange Management Console. The other thing that it's allowed us to do is it sets the basis for the GUI tools we're using with RBAC and then only showing you the features in the tools that you actually have access to. And because remote PowerShell has this concept of restricted run spaces, it only gives you access to the things you have access to through RBAC.
So it's given the administrators an easier-to-use tool when they delegate things The other thing for remote PowerShell—it also enables customers that don't have a 64-bit OS to install the management tools. They're actually able to run remote PowerShell on a 32-bit OS and still connect to the Exchange server and do scripting through there. So it's given us quite a powerful platform to work from.
Q: The Outlook Web App (OWA) improvements in Exchange 2010 seem to make it a true rival for the Outlook desktop client. Do you anticipate this situation affecting upgrades to Outlook 2010, which isn't available yet?
McClean: I don't think it will stop people upgrading. But it gives organizations more choice. So what we're finding is a number of organizations where they may not have given their users email access at all because they don't all have a PC or they're working on shifts and have to share PCs—it now gives them a far greater option to give their people a browser-based tool to connect to. So it's really about making sure that organizations have a choice about which tool they want to use, and in making that choice they're not losing functionality, which is why you'll see a lot of the functionality in OWA is reflected in Outlook 2010. So it's about making sure that we give as much parity across all of our clients as possible.
Q: What features are available in OWA 2010 and, eventually, in Outlook 2010 that you won't get with Outlook 2007?
McClean: I don't know if I have a complete list, but the major ones would be conversation view, the new conversation view that's actually driven from Exchange. MailTips is something that's only available in those two. The personal archives is only accessible in OWA or Outlook 2010. The calendar sharing options where you can share privacy information with other organizations. They're probably the major ones.
Q: But if you upgrade to Exchange 2010, you can use all of these in OWA, even if you haven't upgraded Outlook?
McClean: Absolutely.
Q: We've covered a lot of ground and I'm sure you've answered some questions our readers still had about Exchange 2010. Do you have anything to add?
McClean: We're really excited about this release. I've just come back from TechEd in Europe, where we did our launch in Berlin, and the buzz from the community and the people that stormed our booth was really quite infectious. We had a lot of excited people. A lot of our sessions, we had to turn people away because there was just so much interest in them. There's a really high level of buzz about this and it's great to see because we've put a lot of work into this release. We know there are a lot of good features in there, and it's really good to see the community reaction to those features by getting this feedback. There are a lot of excited people out there.
Q: One of the things we've encountered in the past when we start writing about the newest releases is that many IT pros in our audience, for whatever reason, simply aren't ready for upgrading yet. Did you encounter any of that sort of sentiment as well?
McClean: One of the things that we have heard is that there's a lot of our Exchange 2003 customers, and they say to us, "Well we were looking at Exchange 2007, but now I've looked at what Exchange 2010 has got and we're going straight there." And that's something that we hear over and over again from 2003 customers. And even some 2007 customers, although there's no in-place upgrade, because we have the online move mailbox feature, which means that they can move mailboxes across to the new infrastructure without impacting their users, that certainly softens the blow in terms of user impact, which in the end is something that's most important to organization. That's a feature that people are particularly excited about in terms of making it a very smooth deployment process.
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