As Microsoft promised a couple of months back there would be a public beta of Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2010.

See: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/04/07/454533.aspx for the announcement.

Citing the link above we see that there are a couple of features interesting for us mobility guys:
- Tether-free Information Rights Management (IRM).
- Support for send-as.
- Notify on block/quarantine.
- Full implementation of conversation view.

In addition the admin will be able to administer Allow/Block/Quarantine in OWA/ECP.

There are of course other features not related to mobility too, but have one guess what I’m going to be looking into

Service Packs for Exchange works in a user-friendly manner. You download one package, and if you install it on an existing Exchange Server it will perform a regular upgrade. If you install it on a clean server it’s a full install. I opted for setting up a new server in my existing environment to minimize the risks.

There’s no release notes yet, so due to the fact that I missed out on some prereqs, (which for some reason was not detected by the installer), I had to do two installs to get things right. I’ll assume you get it right the first time around, and step into new bits I can find

New “Phone & Voice” options when logged in as admin:

An overview of the quarantined and blocked devices:

The available ActiveSync polices are listed as well, with the option of creating new ones without going into the regular console:

On your right hand side you’ll see the settings contained in the policy:

When looking up the details of a device there’s a couple of new fields as well:

I hooked up an HTC S740, and unsurprisingly it behaved the same way it did before. Syncing happily, but no new features. (As you can see from the details above it reports an ActiveSync version of 12.1 which would correspond to Exchange 2007 SP1.)

I then tried to hook up a Windows Mobile 6.5.3 Professional emulator with Office 2010 Mobile. It worked nicely too, but still didn’t report any higher version than 14.0.

So, I don’t really have a 14.1 client at the ready to test… But how can I be sure that there is something new on the client side? The MS-ASCMD protocol documents are updated over at MSDN, and if you check the status codes you’ll see that all numbers above 156 are new:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee218647(v=EXCHG.80).aspx

From this we learn that IRM is present, as well as contacts pictures, and a setting for how many devices one account is allowed to sync with. If you’re thinking that pictures attached to contacts aren’t a new concept you are right, but this is a new feature in Exchange 2010 in the sense that the pictures are stored in Active Directory. Technically it’s not Exchange that is responsible, but you get the picture…ha-ha…
(http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/06/01/455005.aspx)

This doesn’t give us much leverage as to actually do the “seeing is believing” experience since we don’t have a compatible client. I tried connecting my own desktop client (EAS MD), where I can easily report the version number of my choosing. For some reason this didn’t work – it refused to sync. Could of course be a bug on my part, or it could be some change to the protocol – don’t know yet. I’ll have to keep looking at the bits and bytes.

I tried looking for traces of IRM settings in the console, but I couldn’t find any. Granted I keep hitting exceptions in parts of the console, so they could be hiding there, but I don’t think so.

If you look through the cmdlets though you’ll find IRM to be enabled. Just run Get-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory |FL *IRM*, and you should see a parameter called IRMEnabled set to true. This would probably require using Set-IRMConfig as well, which I haven’t tested yet (this one seems to be available in Exchange 2010 RTM as well.) I guess that’s one more thing to look into (Off-topic: there’s also a parameter called SilverLightEnabled on the OWAVirtualDirectory so maybe we’ll be seeing more snappy UIs as well.)

As with some of my other beta previews I’m not giving you a lot of straight answers. But such is the nature of testing the undocumented features out there. I’ll certainly be continuing my research for greater mobility experiences, and even if you might not have learned all that much from this article I hope you find some entertainment/usefulness in quick spins like these nonetheless.