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Not only does Gartner predict an IT spend rebound in 2010 (wishful thinking, but fingers crossed!), but also that Unified Communications will become one of the most strategic technologies your can’t afford to ignore. The table below was presented at Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo 2009, October 18-22, in Orlando.

Source: here

The Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a free cloud based tool that helps Exchange system administrators test:

• Exchange ActiveSync
• ActiveSync AutoDiscover
• Exchange Web Services
• Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP)
• Outlook AutoDiscover
• Internet SMTP Email

This was previously in beta, the final version is available at https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

New/updated features include:

• Updated user interface
• New CAPTCHA implementation. (This is the hard to read words that make you prove you are a human)
• No more ‘Beta’ label
• Additional tests
  – 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 ExchangeImpersonation.
  – Outbound SMTP – Performs Reverse DNS testing, DNS RBL Checks, and SenderID validation against a provided “outbound” IP address
• Updated the Outlook Anywhere test logic to work with Exchange 2010
• Added a link in the footer to the Remote Connectivity Analyzer TechNet forum
• 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.

Source: here

Just a quick blog post I couldn’t resist! Whilst Exchange 2010 delivers a number of enterprise strength enhancements, you and your users will no doubt love the “Ignore Conversations” option. This is particularly useful when you are included in group e-mails that you could care less about!

Clients supported include Outlook 2010 and Outlook WebApp (screenshot below).

A security patch that addresses – “MS09-056: Vulnerabilities in CryptoAPI could allow spoofing” has been reported to alter your LCS/OCS installations and send them into evaluation mode with expiry. For those that have already applied this hotfix uninstallation will address this issue.

Source: here

The Microsoft Exchange Team has just announced that Exchange 2010 has now RTM’ed!

I have been running their beta and release candidate versions for a number of months and even published a guide on UM integration. I can honestly say this version is the best to date, some of my favourite features include:

• Voicemail to text
• OCS presence within Outlook Web App (without an installed copy of Communicator)
• Call answering rules (see below)

Source: here

If you are then see you there! It seems that this eventwas  fully registered some time back – I wonder if the rumoured free copy of Windows 7 influenced this?

The TechNet folks seem to be pretty excited by the looks of the buzz over on Twitter…