Easier Server Management
The enhanced DSAccess component and MOM support are the most important technological enhancements that SP2 makes to Exchange 2000 management. However, Microsoft has included other fixes and updates in SP2.
Message archival. The SP2 CD-ROM's \support directory contains a message-tracing tool called Regtrace. This tool isn't the same type of message-archival application that third-party vendors provide. Rather, you can use the utility to help debug problems with SMTP traffic. Regtrace dumps all the email that an SMTP virtual server handles into a disk directory, from which you can examine the email to determine where problems exist. You won't use this utility every day, but it's a useful addition to your toolkit.
Message tracking. Along the same lines, the MMC Exchange Message Tracking Center snap-in, which you can access directly through a custom MMC console or through the ESM, has received a complete face-lift. The snap-in now has an Outlook-like GUI, which Figure 2 shows, to help you through the process of tracking down missing messages. The way that Exchange processes tracking requests also has changed. Previously, an administrative console that wanted to track a message needed to poll all the servers involved in the message's path through the organization. The console extracted the tracking logs from any of the servers on which message tracking was enabled, then interrogated the logs for matching entries. With SP2, the console sends tracking requests to each server, which processes the request locally and responds only with matching entries instead of with the entire log. This approach reduces network traffic and speeds up the tracking process. (For more information about message tracking, see "Exchange 2000's Message Tracking Center," December 2000, InstantDoc ID 16006.)
New Exchange Management service. The new DSAccess and Message Tracking interfaces both depend on SP2's new Microsoft Exchange Management service. This service is somewhat like the System Attendant service in that it performs management operations on behalf of a server. (You can find the Exchange Management service in the service list that appears when Exchange 2000 starts up.) If the service isn't running, you won't be able to access directory information or use the Message Tracking Center.
Clearer notifications. Another SP2 benefit comes in the form of improved text for Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs), which users receive when a message can't be delivered. Messages might go undelivered for myriad reasons, but the cause is often obscured by cryptic text that makes little sense to the average user. SP2 clarifies this text somewhat. For example, Exchange 2000 and SP1 generate the same DSN for a message with an address that Exchange can't resolve by looking up a target server in DNS and for a message that an administrator removed from an SMTP queue. SP2, however, provides more information. Figure 3, page 54, shows the DSNs that SP2 sends for both of those situations. (Exchange 2000 SP2 generates the upper DSN when an address doesn't exist in the SMTP domain and returns the lower DSN when an administrator removes a message from a queue.) Users still might not fully understand the DSNs' text, but at least the improved text can help support personnel resolve the problem that caused the DSN.
You can't customize DSN messages, but SP2 does add a new transport event that the Routing Engine service can fire before Exchange generates a DSN message. You can write code and associate it with this event to add suitable text to a DSN message, but only for outgoing messages to people who've sent undeliverable messages to your server. The new event is interesting, but it won't help most users, and most administrators don't want to write code.
OWA: More to Love
Microsoft was pleasantly surprised by the success of Exchange 2000's OWA client. Many enterprises have realized the benefit of providing users with this highly functional stateless client. Microsoft responded to the increased customer interest by upgrading OWA functionality in SP1 and providing more upgrades in SP2. Some of the benefits are subtle: Performance is snappier and OWA's available views are more similar to Outlook's. OWA now sends out notifications when new messages arrive and supports calendar notifications. Such notifications might seem like a small step, but they'll endear OWA to users. (The notification features depend on extended browser support, so they're available only to clients that use Internet Explorer—IE—5.0 or later.)
SP2's version of OWA also provides a logoff page so that users can flush their credentials and prevent another person from coming along and accessing their email. The logoff page shuts down IE, which is a good (if blunt) method. OWA now delivers better printing, too—my favorite improvement. Earlier versions of OWA never quite seemed able to format calendars for printing. Application service providers (ASPs) will be happy to know that you can now provide OWA in a modular fashion. In other words, you can give users select access to one or several components, including email, calendar, and public folders. And SP2 upgrades OWA's search capabilities. For example, OWA now can exploit any full-text indexes that you've created on the Exchange 2000 server for public folders or mailboxes.
OWA still isn't perfect, but it's now the richest and most functional browser-based email client available. OWA still doesn't provide all the functionality of Outlook. A spell checker is the most obvious omission, but Microsoft speakers at the recent Microsoft Enterprise Conference (MEC) in Orlando, Florida, expressed interest in providing spell-checking functionality, so maybe that feature will appear in the next service pack. Of course, amenities such as Outlook's encrypted email feature might never appear in OWA because of the security concerns such features would involve.
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