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Because of the complexity of Microsoft Exchange Server management and administration, many companies want to consolidate thousands of Exchange users on one server. As a deployment grows, its increasing number of servers can make administrative tasks such as adding, moving, and deleting users extremely time-consuming for Exchange administrators. Administrators must use a combination of applications to administer and manage the Exchange environment, which makes administration of large implementations more difficult. Future versions of Exchange Server will simplify some of these management and administrative tasks and will enable administrators to perform all Exchange administrative tasks through one application. However, for now, Exchange Server’s diversity of tasks and tools leads many companies to want to consolidate as many users as possible on each Exchange Server machine.

Microsoft has been using the Security Development Life cycle (SDL) across its product lines for several years now, and we’ve seen an across-the-board improvement in product security as a result. As a security practitioner, this situation makes me happy indeed, but as an Exchange Server administrator, I want functional improvements to the product as well. Given that Microsoft is already actively working on the next version of Exchange, I wanted to set down a few things I’d like to see in the Exchange Server of the future.

Keep in mind that for every feature we get, there are other features that don’t make the cut. Even with the company’s massive resources behind them, Microsoft’s developers have constraints that prevent them from adding every desired feature while still meeting their schedules and deadlines. That said, here are a few items from my wish list for the next Exchange release.

Let’s start with a relatively easy one: The next version of Exchange should include full support for Outlook Web Access’ premium mode in Firefox and Safari. Multiple-browser support is an important check box for the education market (where you’re likely to find more people using non-Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers), but it’s also something that I would expect to see from the company that pioneered the commercial use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) in Web applications–not to mention that Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access and all of IBM’s Lotus products already fully support these browsers.

How about certificates? Microsoft Exchange Server has a Certificate Wizard that helps you get the right set of machine names and subject alternative names in your certificate requests. Now that the OCS and Exchange product lines are part of the same business unit within Microsoft, perhaps the two teams could collaborate to produce a single certificate tool that collects all the necessary parameters for certificate requests? Network security and Exchange administrators everywhere would greatly appreciate and benefit from such a feature.

I’ve heard many requests for running Exchange services on Windows Server Core, the bare bones install option with Windows Server 2008; the obstacle here is that the current version of Windows Power Shell won’t run on Server Core. The Windows or Power Shell teams might address this problem on their own; personally, I’d rather they spent their engineering efforts on giving us complete support for running Exchange under Hyper-V.

Nina Swadie is an Online Small Business Support Executive for iYogi who provides detailed information on Online Server Support, in Small Business Server Support, Exchange Server Support, Terminal Server Support, Windows 2000 & 2003 Server, in Server Support, Small business technical support and Windows Server Support etc.

Author: Nina Swadie
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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