Microsoft has been releasing small nuggets of info related to the next release of Exchange, (also known as Exchange 14, and now Exchange 2010), for a couple of months now but other than the occasional screenshot we haven’t seen much of it hands-on. Last week Exchange 2010 was released to the general population in the form of a Beta release. You can read the announcement and more details over at TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/2010/default.aspx

Maybe not surprising, but I was interested in learning what this will bring me related to mobility and ActiveSync related features. So I went ahead and installed it. Since the beta requires a Windows Server 2003 domain, and obviously not any existing Exchange servers already installed, I had to bring up a new domain. But other than that installing it was a smooth experience. (There’s a long list of pre-requisites you have to install, but that’s not of relevance in this space.) Unfortunately I’ve been travelling the past few days so I didn’t get around to blogging about it until now – it’s not due to laziness I’m this slow in bringing it out

So looking into the ActiveSync policies we don’t really see any changes from Exchange 2007, but here’s what it looks like (this is the default policy Exchange configures for you):

Well, ok for now I guess being a beta and all The policy settings that aren’t available here, and are supported on existing devices, would still need SCMDM or another MDM platform. I do not know if they will include more settings as Windows Mobile 6.5 comes around. I don’t expect Exchange to become a full-blown MDM platform either, but everyone loves new features regardless of whether they are needed or not don’t they?

Logging into Outlook Web Access there are some changes. If you bring up “Options” they clearly want you to configure a mobile device:

Clicking brings up a new window stating that content will be provided at a later time. But I’m guessing it will be aimed at non-technical first-time users detailing the basic steps.

There is a new tab called “Phone” in “Options” as well giving you an overview of your devices and the possibility to do SMS in OWA.

I believe I read about sending and receiving SMS being a possibility in OWA, but cannot find any reference in the GUI to a feature like that. The “Text Messaging” is apparently only used for notifications to your device currently:

Which brings you to the settings:

I can see the use case for this feature, but I don’t find it terribly useful. That might be a personal preference though, and if someone else loves the feature that’s perfectly acceptable. At any rate I am not able to test it myself as you’re limited to using either a US or Chinese mobile operator at the moment.

I don’t know if it’s possible to “hack” this to support other operators or your own SMS gateway for that matter. I’m not so eager to test it that I’ll be looking into it at the moment.

There are of course lots of other improvements to Exchange, and while I’m interested in the mobile bits I realize that there are other features that might rank higher on the importance list for many others I’ll continue experimenting, and share my what I learn. (Exchange Web Services is something I’ve played with before, and you can do lots of neat stuff with that from your device so maybe I’ll look into that.)