[mustangraven]

I went to the MS launch event yesterday at the albany crowne plaza hotel for Vista, office 2007, exchange server 2007. figured I would post some of the new info I gleened from the event for the MS geeks out there. MS gave each of us a free copy of office 2007 which was nice a tshirt light up pen a pad and one of those goofy synch bag backpack things. not a bad haul for free crap I thought.
The MS speaker was excellent very knowledgable yet not overly technical and very personable. Probably the best tech seminar I have been to. As some of you know that server admin tools pak does not work on vista without hacking the registry and exchange server admin utils just dont wrk on vista period. Being a bit of an antagonist during Q&A I asked him about it and he did not deny it and was upfront and said it was true and that it was being worked on and MS does not recomend admins use vista until those kinks are worked out. Which I thought was very cool. Overall vista has alot of great new features especially nice is the new user permissions engine they are using which means that annoying prompt when you go to install something is actually for a reason. each time something is installed the prompt elevates your permissions by using a split token to do the install which is to prevent malware spyware virii etc etc. there were other nice features also but I dont want to blather on on vista
Office 2007. Looked really nice a big change from 2003 which was basically a rehash of office xp. I asked him about about the issue with access not working with vista also and legacy access apps also being broken. He said a SP is in the works to fix access issues but the other apps are sound. all apps work fine on xp. if you want to play with office 2007 I would recomend it on a xp box for now until the interoporablity issues with vista are sorted out.
exchange 2007. this was the real reason I was at the event! there are alot of new features in exchange 2007 the biggest change is that it will only work in 64 bit configurations bye bye 32 bit exchange. also you can do split installs on the new exchange which allows you to use multiple servers to delegate the exchange tasks which will be really nice to spread the load around a bit. another new feature is the gatway exhage server portion which gives you the ability to put the exchange gateway out side of your domain to do the routing/filtering of emails so nothing gets into your domain at all that you do not want. it looks up mailboxes using a ldap proceedure which is nice (kinda reminded me of some opensource solutions out there to be honest). However you can still do a single exchange server install if you are running a smaller exchange situation. even so I would still recomend an old box to do the gateway machine as it is such a great new feature if done correctly it could seriously reduce spam!

Ok enough geek talk from me just figured I would give you all the straight poop on MS's new venture.