Yesterday I went to Microsoft Event “The New Efficiency” @ KLCC Convention Centre. The new efficiency launched for the next generations of computer are:
Windows® 7, Windows Server®2008 R2 and Microsoft®Exchange Server 2010.
What you learn from “The New Efficiency” event An event mainly target for IT Professionals to :-
- Get more from your existing systems, with solutions that work together and are interoperable.
- Simplify IT infrastructure management to help lower costs and manage compliance demands.
- Build on existing skills, with new innovations based on familiar Microsoft processes and interfaces, backed by a huge base of support.
- Connect people to information, using products with advanced features
Awesome Windows 7
Help reduce management costs, improve productivity, and manage risks through enhanced security and control.
More about windows 7 features
What the heck is “Windows Server®2008 R2″
With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, companies of all sizes will get big improvements in virtualization, Web and management. These areas, along with several features that improve scalability and reliability, help deliver a strong value proposition on the server side to complement Windows 7
More about Windows Server®2008 R2
New features in Microsoft®Exchange Server 2010
This release of Exchange 2010 introduces a new integrated e-mail archive and features to help reduce costs and improve the user experience.
Exchange 2010 will help organizations reduce costs, protect communications and delight e-mail users with capabilities to do the following:
Lower costs with more flexible deployment and management options.
Exchange 2010 provides organizations with the same enterprise-grade capabilities whether deployed on-premises or as a service from Microsoft or partners — or as a mix of both. Further, for customers deploying the server, the new release simplifies the way organizations provide always-on communications and disaster recovery, meaning administrators spend less time managing their e-mail system. Exchange 2010 further improves performance running on lower-cost direct-attached storage, enabling organizations to dramatically reduce storage costs by up to 85 percent without sacrificing performance or reliability.
Protect information and meet compliance requirements with the new e-mail archive.
As e-mail volume grows, companies must address increasing compliance, legal and e-discovery concerns, but today, according to Osterman Research, only 28 percent of organizations currently archive their e-mail content (Osterman Research, 2008). Exchange 2010 introduces an integrated e-mail archive. The new solution makes it easier to store and query e-mail across the organization using the Exchange software that organizations already know and use.
Improve user productivity with the ultimate inbox experience.
It is estimated that the average number of corporate e-mail messages received per person per day is expected to reach more than 93 by 2010. In addition, businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary interruptions including those from e-mail (Basex, 2008).
Exchange 2010, together with Microsoft Outlook 2010, will give people more control over their communications with features such as these:
MailTips
Have you experience after you had type out an email only to find out (through an auto response) that the recipient is on holiday or vacation for 1 week? This means we either wait for 1 weeks for a response or email to another contact. For the recipient, its frustration having dealing with loads of email messages when returning from vacation.
One of the features in Exchange Server 2010 developed is MailTips . MailTips will give you information about your message and its recipients before you hit the send button. For example, MailTip will show you automatic replies for recipients of your message:
When you know that someone is on vacation before you send them a message, you don’t have to waste your time writing it, and they won’t have to read as so many emails when they get back.
Have you ever read an email from someone and thought to yourself, “Do they realize how many people just got that message?” All too often, the answer is “no.” MailTips will tell you when you’re sending a message to a large audience, and summarize it for you, like this:
Hopefully this person will probably think twice before emailing all 438 people!
Another common email faux pas is when someone replies-all on a message they received via BCC. When they do, they reveal to other recipients that they received the message via BCC-often with embarrassing results. MailTips will warn you when you reply-all on BCC:
External recipients: MailTips will let you know if you are sending a message to an external recipient (that is, somebody whose email address is outside your organization), or if a distribution group you’re sending to contains external recipients (in the case of external recipients in a DL, MailTips only says how many external recipients there are, not who they are). Organizations can turn this MailTip off, if emailing external recipients is not a concern.
Mailbox full: You can know before you send if the recipient’s mailbox is full, or if the message you’re about to send is big enough to fill the mailbox.
Oversized message: This MailTip is displayed when composing a message that exceeds size limits within your organization.
Moderated group: MailTips will tell you that you are sending an email to a moderated group (which is a new feature in Exchange 2010… keep an eye out for a blog post on that). In this case, your message would be delayed pending moderator approval.
Restricted recipient: If you don’t have permission to send to a mailbox or distribution list, MailTips will tell you right up front.
Invalid recipient: If someone leaves your organization, they might remain in the autocomplete list of Outlook users. In the past, sending a mail to this user would result in a bounced message (which would then remove them from the autocomplete list). With MailTips, we can notify you before send that a user doesn’t exist anymore.
Custom MailTip: Administrators and group owners can set custom MailTips. These are intended to replace messages that might otherwise be sent as an automatic response. Examples of these are messages like “You will receive a response within 72 hours” or “this mailbox is not monitored.” They might also be useful for a user who works part time, and might not want to always have an automatic reply set up. Custom MailTips can be localized so that users can see them in their own language.
Voice Mail- Preview. See text previews of voice mail directly in Outlook.
Voice Mail Preview will literally transform the way that you look at voice messages in Exchange.
Exchange Unified Messaging (UM) makes it easy to manage your voice messages by delivering them in your Inbox. You can then use many types of Exchange mail client software to review your voice mail. Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Web Access (OWA), Outlook Mobile (and other clients connected via Exchange ActiveSync) and, of course Outlook Voice Access (the speech access interface in Exchange UM) are examples of the ways that you can now retrieve voice mail.
Figure 1. Exchange UM voice mail in the Inbox
If you’re using a visual mail client such as Outlook to review your voice mail, it’s great to see at a glance the message details (date/time, length) and the number or name of the sender. In Outlook and OWA, you can even add your own text in an Audio Notes field. This permits you to annotate the message so that you can see what it’s about, should you return to it later. You can also search for the message by one or more words in the note, as you’re used to doing for e-mail.
People who have used the Audio Notes feature since Exchange 2007 have surely sometimes wished that the annotations could be generated automatically.
In Exchange 2010, the Voice Mail Preview feature will do this, and more. By the time that a voice message arrives in your Inbox, UM can insert a Preview. This is machine-generated text that is derived from the voice recording. You can usually gain a good sense of the recorded content by looking at the Preview. Text in the Preview is indexed, so you can search for voice messages without Audio Notes. You can add additional information or make corrections through the Audio Notes field, if required.
Figure 2. Voice Mail Preview (sample message)
Figure 2 shows an example of an actual voice message with a Preview, received. Some of the text in the figure has been obscured to protect the identity of the caller. In this case, when you’re in the meeting and unable to play the audio, you can have a glance at the message.
Ignore Conversation – This e-mail “mute button” allows people to remove themselves from an irrelevant e-mail string, reducing unwanted e-mail and runaway reply-all threads.
Conversation View – Combine related e-mail messages in a single conversation to reduce inbox clutter.
Call Answering Rules – Create customized “Press 1 for …” call-routing menus with Exchange voice mail.
More detail on Call Answering Rules
Consistent Experience – Use Outlook on the PC, a mobile phone or a browser for the same experience with enhancements in Outlook Mobile and Outlook Web Access.
Other Resources
Microsoft-Office-2010-Exchange-Overview-Fact-Sheet
Contest & freebies…
Missed their hunt for cash decipher code contest as i arrived late at about 10.30am, however I still tried to decipher the code aiming for the grand prize “Lenovo ThinkPad T400s” (Didn’t win though.. . In the meantime, played other fun games, got this donut dispenser ,a Post-it Pop, Windows
Reference: msexchangeteam.com, www.infoworld.com, www.microsoft.com