EXC03: Archiving and Compliance Solutions in Exchange 2007
Kieran McCorry
This session provides an in-depth look at the archiving and key compliance capabilities and technologies in Exchange 2007: what’s good about them and what’s not so good about them. The session will also describe how other technologies can be used to work alongside the core compliance functionalities, how best they should be integrated, and will indicate what real compliance features need to be developed to make archiving and compliance a reality in Exchange.

EXC01: Communicator, Exchange, Office and SharePoint – Synergy in Action!
Kevin Laahs
The products mentioned in the title of this abstract are very common in a Microsoft-centric communications environment. Are you getting the most out of them? How do they work together and what features would be unavailable if they weren’t playing nice? In this session we look at how you can gain maximum benefit from your investment in these products by ensuring your environments are configured appropriately to support the various integration points. For example you will understand how something like the Exchange 2007 Autodiscover Web Service plays a role in informing Communicator clients in another organization that you are out of office or in a meeting. In addition to looking at the various out-of-the-box integration points, we will also investigate potential areas for customizing and extending these products for your own use. As an example, we will look at how you can view public details from a user’s SharePoint My Site inside your Communicator client. From a learning perspective synergy will be exhibited by ensuring both slideware and demonstrations are used throughout this session!

EXC17: Exchange 2007 Monitoring with OPSMGR 2007
Michael B. Smith
Exchange 2007 does not stand alone. It is an application that depends on other infrastructure for it to work properly including Active Directory, DNS, Windows Server, etc. In this session, we will discuss configuring monitoring and health for all facets of an Exchange eco-system, basing health and monitoring on OpsMgr 2007.

EXC07: Exchange 2007 SP1 Sizing and Performance: Navigating the 64-bit Waters
Karl Robinson
To achieve the design goals associated with Exchange 2007, many of which were hampered architecturally by Exchange 2003’s 32-bit glass ceiling, the move to an x64 architecture was necessary. This session delves into the specific areas of performance and scalability improvement associated with Exchange 2007, addresses new considerations in planning and sizing the various roles and features (including the various replication schemes), and addresses the impact of specific hardware technologies on an Exchange deployment.

EXC05: Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Planning and Best Practices
Karl Robinson
This session discusses the inner workings of the Unified Messaging role and the best practices for deployment including the details of performance testing and analysis.

EXC16: Exchange High-Availability with Windows Load Balancing Services
Michael B. Smith
With all the new features available for HA with mailbox servers (CCR, SCR, LCR, etc.) many people overlook the HA features present for HT and CAS. In this session we will discuss how to provide HA services for CAS, HT, and CAS/HT servers, using both the built-in features of Exchange Server 2007 and WLBS.

EXC15: Exchange Messaging Records Management
Michael B. Smith
In this session we will discuss how to use the MRM features of Exchange 2007 to provide the features that were present in Exchange 2003 Mailbox Manager for the deletion of old e-mail. We will be using the Default Folders capabilities so that an Exchange Standard CAL is sufficient.

EXC14: Exchange Server 2007 Security Best Practices
William Lefkovics
Is Exchange 2007 really secure out of the box? Not necessarily. We will look at all the steps you should take to secure a default installation of Exchange 2007 and what tools are available to confirm or enforce that configuration, specific to each role. We will discuss Microsoft Update, antispam updates, the Best Practices Analyzer, and the Security Configuration Wizard (Exchange templates). We’ll give consideration to IIS and Windows, including the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA). We’ll discuss anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spam and Auntie Em.

EXC06: Exchange Server 2007 Storage Solutions
Karl Robinson
The Exchange Server 2007 mailbox role can be deployed successfully on a variety of storage platforms ranging from Fibre Channel or iSCSI SANs to direct attached storage (DAS) deployments. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and small form factor (SFF) disk technology have added to the options available for Exchange storage solutions. This session discusses a range of storage solutions to meet your business needs.

EXC02: Make Outlook 2007 Happy with Exchange 2007 Web Services
Kevin Laahs
Exchange 2007 uses Web services to support certain crucial functionality and both Exchange Administrators and developers need to be aware of this. Examples of such services are discovering mailbox connection settings, finding out free/busy information, setting out-of-office, downloading offline address books, and accessing mailbox content. Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 is the primary consumer of these services but they are also used by other internal components such as when doing cross-forest free/busy lookups. Indeed, supporting cross-forest operations becomes much easier with the introduction of the Autodiscover Web service. It is the Client Access Server (CAS) that supports these Web services, and so in this session we first look at its architecture and then move on to the individual Web services with the main focus being the Autodiscover and Availability Web services. We look at how the services work and take a detailed look at how Outlook 2007 benefits from these services, allowing you to make informed decisions about how to best architect and deploy CAS servers within your own organization. Exchange Web Services also support integrating line-of-business applications with information stored in Exchange. Examples include calendaring and contact applications or applications that access other content from the Exchange store, like creating, editing, and sending messages or handling tasks. This session therefore also gives an overview of the generic capabilities of Exchange Web Services in order for you to have an appreciation of how they may be used in your line-of-business applications.

EXC04: Outlook Anywhere Scaling—Notes from the Field
Kieran McCorry
Outlook Anywhere is a great way to access your Exchange environment. And with the current buzz on Cloud Computing, you may think it’s the preferred way to access your mail. Many organizations are leaning towards this notion, but there are a number of things to watch out for as you deploy an Outlook Anywhere only environment. This session covers a sample architecture that has been implemented in the real world and has many useful hints and tips for best deployment practices and scaling issues.

EXC09: The CAS Role – Food for Thought?
Kevin Laahs
Exchange 2007 introduces server roles that aim to simplify deployments. One role is called the Client Access Role and it plays a crucial role in supporting many different clients such as Outlook Web Access (OWA) for browsers, Exchange Active Sync (EAS) for mobile devices, Web Services for Outlook 2007 and IMAP4 and POP3 for the widest choice of clients. In this session we look at the architecture of the CAS, how it interacts with other server roles and deployment considerations. The CAS role is also called upon by other products such as Communicator and we will demonstrate how you analyze the activity that these clients are imposing upon your Exchange 2007 infratsructure. Lastly we also take a look at the end user functionality provided by OWA and EAS.

EXC13: Tools, Tools, Tools! No. Not Users. The Exchange 2007 Management Toolbox
William Lefkovics
The Exchange Management Console in Exchange 2007 has a section dedicated to tools. It seems, Exchange Server itself needs a little help once in a while. We will review the tools in the EMC covering what they do, when to use them and even when not to. This overview includes: Best Practices Analyzer Mail Flow TroubleShooter, Queue Viewer, Message Tracking, Database TroubleShooter.

EXC18: Turbo-Charged Mission Critical Exchange Design & Architecture
Frank Wrubel
Marc Sugarman
In this session, we will discuss work that has been done to test the limits of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 using various consolidation methodologies and virtualization technologies, with a particular emphasis on bottom line results/savings. The objective of this effort has been to increase the utilization of large-scale, enterprise-class e-mail environment assets and to reduce the cost to organizations while increasing the security, resilience, and responsiveness to changing end-user and organizational needs. Detailed architectures and best practices will be reviewed.

EXC08: Using Archiving Solutions to Improve Exchange Operational Effectiveness
Kieran McCorry
Using an archiving product can reap significant benefits for the operational effectiveness of your e-mail system. This case-study based session will describe possible architectural solutions and benefits from implementing such solutions alongside your Exchange environment.

EXC12: When Performance is a Problem, It’s Good to Have a PAL Around
William Lefkovics
Not every company can or wants to deploy SCOM (formerly MOM) to manage and monitor their server deployments. Windows comes with a basic tool called, or at least known as, Performance Monitor. Exchange 2007 Server adds a plethora of perfmon counters for each role. Our PAL, Microsoft’s free Performance Analyzer tool, will help us create charts (in HTML—managers love charts) for management and monitoring from perfmon logs of key Exchange counters. We will walk through the requirements (Office Web components, Log Parser, Codeplex) and configuration (XML config files) to produce a simple monitoring solution.

VENDOR SESSION

VENDOR: DELL EqualLogic Solutions for Microsoft Exchange in Virtual Machine Deployments
Suresh Jasrasaria
Daniel Curran
The Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series is an ideal storage platform for Microsoft® Exchange deployments in dedicated hardware server and hypervisor based virtual machine environments. EqualLogic storage solutions for Microsoft Exchange are easy to deploy and manage and provide comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery features. These solutions include advanced software, like Auto-Snapshot Manager/Microsoft® Edition (ASM/ME) and Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware® Edition (ASM/VE) that provide tight integration with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ and VMware® ESX™ Server respectively. They take full advantage of EqualLogic’s snapshot functionality to help protect virtual machines while ASM/ME also integrates Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology to create Smart Copies of mailbox and log data volumes using snapshots, clones and remote replication to help secure the highest level of protection for Exchange Server data. In this session we will demonstrate how you can easily create Exchange Server mailbox and log data volume Smart Copies that can automatically perform checksum verification and soft recovery in a hypervisor based virtual machine environment. We will also show the recovery of a mailbox and an individual email.

MICROSOFT DAY - EXCHANGE SESSIONS

EMS04: Advanced Troubleshooting Strategies for Exchange Server 2007
John Weston
Are you currently the administrator for Exchange? What version? In this session we will look at understanding the built-in tools for troubleshooting Exchange-related problems. You will also learn about advanced troubleshooting techniques from a theory perspective. We will conclude this session with a brief look about new tools currently under development at Microsoft. One of your key takeaways from this session will be a look at a variety of tools from Windows Server and Exchange Server can provide workflow steps around the troubleshooting process. If you administrate Exchange, this session is a must.

EMS01: Exchange Server 2007 CAS\HUB Deployment, Scaling and Testing
Chris Avis
Exchange 2007 introduces role based server configurations. Planning a large scale deployment can seem like a daunting task. This session will help take some of the mystery away from how to plan for, test and scale your Exchange Client Access and Hub Server deployments.

EMS02: Exchange Server 2007 SP1 and Hyper-V
Dan Stolts
Come for a look at what the impact virtualization is having on Exchange Server 2007. We look at the pro's and the con's of running Exchange in a virtualized environment. We look in depth at performance in this environment. We discuss all aspects of the environment from installation and high availability to Hyper-V Quick Migration and DR planning. We take a look at performance and deployment concerns as well as best practices for running Exchange on Hyper-V.

EMS05: High Availability in Exchange 2007 SP1 – Part 1 – Continuous Replication and Failover Clusters
Harold Wong
With the release of Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft introduced a new clustering capability for Exchange Servers. With SP1, yet another option called Standby Continuous Replication was added to the repertoire. We will start with a discussion on CCR versus SCC and finish with a more in depth look at the technologies behind Continuous Replication.

EMS06: High Availability in Exchange 2007 SP1 - Part 2 – Disaster Recovery and Site Resilience
Harold Wong
When it comes to Disaster Recovery and Site Resilience, there are many options that exist. This session will focus on options that are “included” with Exchange Server 2007 SP1 utilizing technologies such as CCR and / or SCR.

EMS03: Migrating to Exchange Server 2007
Chris Avis
For this sessions we will focus on migration planning and strategies for migrating your existing Exchange installations to Exchange 2007. We will look at migration scenarios starting with Exchange 5.5 and ending with Exchange 2007 to 2007 scenarios. We will also discuss a variety of actions and tools used to help make the migrations as simple as possible.

EMS12: Planning and Deploying Group Chat with OCS 2007 R2
John Weston
In this session we will discuss this new feature of OCS 2007 R2 that just released. What is Persistent Group chat? Persistent group chat enables people to carry on topic-specific, multi-party discussions that persist over time - leading to better team information sharing. We will look at the key features of this new product and discuss common use cases for them.

EMS08: Using Exchange Server 2007 for Voicemail (and Integration with OCS 2007)
John Weston
Come to this session where we will explain why you want to connect and deploy Exchange Unified Message along with OCS 2007, why these two solutions are a better together feature set. How end users will be impacted by the advantages of having these two products installed together. We will walk thru call flows for important OCS-UM scenarios. Come with your questions ready!

EMS10: What’s New in Conferencing with OCS 2007 R2?
Harold Wong
Come learn what’s new with Audio, Video and Web Conferencing in Office Communications Server 2007 R2. In this session, we will look specifically at the conferencing enhancements that encompass server side capabilities and client side capabilities.

EMS11: What’s New in Mobility and Web Access with OCS 2007 R2?
John Weston
Come to this session to see what is new in Communicator Mobile, also we will discuss CWA (Client Web Access) for OCS 2007 R2. We will look at new features like “Click to call”, “One Number calling”, “Unified Voice Mail repository”, and “Least cost Routing”. We will also discuss battery life impact of running communicator software on a smart phone and how we have made improvements in this area.

EMS09: What’s New in OCS 2007 R2?
Harold Wong
With the recent release of Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Microsoft has made some major enhancements to their Unified Communications stack. This session will focus on new capabilities that address three key areas: Streamlined Communications, Operational Flexibility & Control, and Extensible Communications Platform. Some examples of these capabilities include Group Chat, Communicator Attendant and On premise audio conferencing bridge.

EMS07: Who Needs a GUI for Exchange? Script It!
Chris Avis
Who needs a GUI? We don't for Exchange 2007! How would you like to simplify and automate some of the day-to-day tasks that normally require a large number of repetitive click steps in Exchange 2007? This session will start off showing some of the basic function the Exchange Command shell can do and end with advanced scripts for automating activities in Exchange 2007....and we will only use the gui to show visual confirmations of our actions!