Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2

No doubt about the Exchange 2007 success in the market. It is being one of the Rocking product in the Microsoft Exchange yard. We have seen Exchange 2007 product, then Exchange 2007 with sp1 and then latest Rollout 9. Now it is a time to go with Exchange 2007 Sp2.

For downloading the Exchange 2007 Sp2 , click here





Installation of Exchange 2007 Sp2:

Installation of Exchange 2007 Sp2 is straight forward as like we had it for Exchange 2007 sp1. i.e Exchange 2007 SP2 can be a fresh installation, or you can do in place upgrade from Exchange 2007\Exchange 2007 sp1 to Exchange 2007 sp2. So those who are planning to have Exchange 2007 as a part of messaging with the latest update they can go with exchange 2007 sp2 where SP1 can be isolated.
The minimum requirement for installing\upgrading exchange 2007 to Sp2 is, you need to have windows installer 4.5 on the computer.

Upgrading to Exchange 2007 SP2:

Recommended way to install Exchange 2007 sp2 -
1) Client Access servers
2) Unified Messaging servers
3) Hub Transport servers
4) Edge Transport servers
5) Mailbox servers

• upgrade Client Access servers that reside in Internet-facing sites before you upgrade Client Access servers that reside in sites without Internet connectivity.
• Upgrading Clustered Mailbox Servers to Exchange 2007 SP1 or SP2

PowerShell Support:
PowerShell Version 2 is supported on all Exchange 2007 SP2 server roles. PSv2 is the preferred solution for PowerShell on Windows Server 2008 servers and servers.

If you are running Exchange 2007 SP2 with PowerShell Version 1, you must prefix your e-mail address with "SMTP" to configure the primary SMTP address

Uninstallation of Exchange 2007 Sp2:
You cannot uninstall Exchange 2007 SP2. After you install Exchange 2007 SP2, the only way to remove it is to remove Exchange 2007 from the computer, and then reinstall an earlier version of Exchange 2007.

Source : Exchange2007sp2 Release Note

Now you will think why bloggers are representing this information as one of the big release, it will be mixing of the feature or fixes of errors what we had in Exchange 2007, Exchange 2007 SP1 and finally Exchange Rollout. Certainly you are correct it is having the combo of old one but apart from that there are certain major requirements we have with this SP2.

Let’s see which are the features has been added in Service Pack2.

• One of the new Feature which will bring smile in the face is, it will help us to manage or configure the Diagnostic Logging from the Exchange Management Console. Initially we need to do this through Powershell.

Figure 1:


 

• Access Auditing: Access Auditing  is the new auditing feature which will help the administrator to give the information about the mailbox access. It is configured as a part of the store.exe. This can be enabled by mode of diagnostic logging under MSExchange IS resource

Figure 2:

 
Lowest will be zero level and expert will be level 5 logging

Some of the auditing which can be achieved :
Folder Access:  Will generate an event when a user is access the folders like  Inbox, Outbox, or Sent Items folders.
Message Access: will generate an event based on the accessing message
Extended Send As: It will generate an event based on sending a message as a mailbox-enabled user
Extended Send on Behalf of: Will generate an event based on sending a message on behalf of a mailbox-enabled user

Inorder to find the evetns, open the eventviewer, expand Applications and Services Logs => Exchange Auditing
Figure 3:

 

PowerShell has been enhanced with few more cmdlets like configuring the “Public Folder Quota Management” then new cmdlets to centrally manage many organization settings for the exchange environment and also to monitor the Named property usage per database can be monitored via cmdlets.

Active Directory Schema Updates: It will allow us to do dynamic AD schema updates. This will enable the easier management of future schema updates. Before Exchange 2007 SP2, writing to an attribute that did not exist in the schema caused a constraint violation. The Active Directory Driver that is included with Exchange 2007 SP2 introduces dynamic validation code that performs additional validation on new attributes where the schema may not contain the attribute as a value.
When you try to change an attribute that does not exist in the mayContain parameter, an exception error occurs. The updated Active Directory Driver provides more detail about the exception error

Support VSS Backup and Restore of Exchange Database:
The biggest part of the Exchange 2007 SP2 it will support Exchange Volume Snapshot Backup which was missing on the Exchange 2007\Exchange 2007 sp1 on Windows Server 2008.

How to Perform a Backup of Exchange Using Windows Server Backup.

How to Restore a Backup of Exchange Using Windows Server Backup.

Support for Exchange 2010 Transition:

Another big reason to get this product is without Exchange 2007 Sp2 you can’t do a transition from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. It means that in order to move the data from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 we need to have SP2 as part of the transition requirement. All you need to do is upgrade your Client Access Server Role with  Exchange 2007 Sp2 atleast.
Now don’t you think service pack2 will be a one of big release for us?


For more details about the Exchange 2007 SP2:

• What's New in Exchange Server 2007 SP2
• Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 available in Q3 2009
• Details of Exchange 2007 SP2 in-box backup when running on Windows Server 2008
• Build numbers and release dates for Exchange Server
• How to obtain the latest service pack or update rollup for Exchange 2007