Higher Education in Exchange

At the TechEd conference June 11-16, Microsoft provided IT administrators and developers with a more comprehensive look at some of its forthcoming products and technologies.

Its easy to get distracted by the broad curriculum at TechEd, so, with limited time, I decided to focus on Exchange Server 2007. I took in two Exchange sessions—one on push technology for mobile devices and the other on unified messaging.

Having been prebriefed on Exchange Server 2007 by Microsoft, I was looking to delve deeper into some of the features and tools.

I wasnt disappointed during the mobile presentation. Although the platforms new user and administrative features arent overly complex, and many of them can be seen in Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2, the presentation and demos were useful in showing how the new management console and command-line interface tie into the 2007 edition of Exchange Server.

TechEd presentations usually spare attendees much of the marketing and feature justifications that come as part of Microsofts hard sell, but that wasnt the case with the session on unified messaging. I did, however, get some good nitty-gritty information on integrating Exchange Server 2007 with a PBX to enable the unified communications components.

Generally speaking, TechEd deals with the broad Microsoft portfolio and is geared for IT professionals who want to get the most out of the companys products. And, refreshingly, the product demos and presentations discuss what the products cannot do, as well as what they can.

Technical Analyst Michael Caton can be reached at michael_caton@ziffdavis.com.

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