The second service packs for Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server are now available and merit special attention by organizations using Exchange. Like their predecessors, the new service packs go beyond performance and security enhancements and contain numerous new features. These features will particularly benefit three groups: users of Exchange’s browser-based client, Outlook Web Access; Exchange administrators; and messaging application service providers whose customers use, OWA.

The new service packs contain all the features and hotfixes contained in the first service packs, integrate 94 additional hotfixes created since Service Pack (SP) 1, and remedy more than 3,000 bugs discovered since Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server first shipped.

New Features for OWA Users

All Exchange users will benefit from SP2’s improved performance and reliability, and OWA users will particularly benefit now that OWA resembles and behaves more like the full Outlook client. However, most of the new OWA features require Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 or higher.

Message search. OWA users can now search their mailboxes and public folders for messages matching various search criteria.

Contact distribution lists. OWA users can create personal e-mail distribution lists (groups of recipients) and store them in their contact lists.

New message and reminder pop-ups. OWA users can receive pop-up notifications when new mail arrives or when a scheduled calendar reminder is triggered. These notification features utilize a subscribe-and-poll mechanism, so they create more network traffic and can have a longer delay than notifications in the regular Outlook client.

New calendar and tree views. Previously, OWA supported only day, week, and month calendar views. With SP2, users can shift-click to select a range of days, even discontinuous ones, to set up a multiday event or meeting. When viewing Exchange folders, the display now shows the number of unread items in each folder.

Improved controls. OWA under SP2 supports new controls that make it more closely resemble regular Outlook behavior, such as support for printing calendars, double-clicking to create new calendar items, or dragging-and-dropping to move them. SP2 also allows OWA to support keyboard shortcut keys, such as Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down.

Log-off warning. Users who use OWA from a public kiosk risk exposing their e-mail to the next kiosk user unless they end their session by closing the browser. SP2 adds a log-off page that tells users how to terminate their OWA session securely, but it does not actually perform any log-off functions. (Any kiosk that has its browser windows locked open by Group Policy or a registry setting cannot destroy users’ credentials, so subsequent users could review the browser’s history, read the previous user’s mail, and even impersonate them—this is a major security risk that can only be resolved by having the kiosk operator reenable the browser’s Close function.)

New Administrative, Security, and Performance Features

Administrators and ASPs who administer Exchange will be grateful for many of the new features introduced in SP2. Some of the most significant include the following:

Improved Active Directory communication. In SP2, communication between Exchange and Active Directory (AD) has been rewritten to improve performance and robustness. Exchange 2000 is no longer limited to working with a single AD controller but can spread the workload over multiple domain controllers. Another benefit of these improvements is that an Exchange server can fail over to an alternate controller if the controller it was using fails or is taken offline. Special routines automatically monitor the state of each AD connection and reconnect to another controller if need be. With SP2, Exchange servers also cache more AD objects locally to improve performance and eliminate unnecessary network traffic. A new tab in the Exchange management interface allows administrators to monitor and tune the links between Exchange and AD.

Better threading and memory management. With SP2, threading and memory management improvements to the message store database improve performance on heavily loaded servers.

Selective exposure of OWA features. SP2 now allows organizations to select the specific components of OWA they want to expose, such as whether they want to provide users with access to the Contacts feature. This is especially useful to ASPs who may bill for individual components.

Automatic error reporting. SP2 provides an option that allows certain Exchange server components to automatically send failure reports to Microsoft. Although this data is not useful to administrators, it should help Microsoft fix bugs through future service packs and hotfixes.

Improved message tracking and archiving. When Exchange administrators are troubleshooting message flow problems, SP2 provides some new capabilities, such as the ability to copy all messages that route through a server into a folder, that make it easier to diagnose where or why message delivery is failing.

Additional migration support. SP1 gave organizations the ability to move users from an Exchange 5.5 organization to a different Exchange 2000 organization. SP2 extends this capability to allow mailbox moves from one Exchange 2000 organization to another.

Enhanced Conferencing Server security. SP2 adds additional security options to Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server, including SSL-secured conference access pages and encryption of data conferences. If the conferencing clients are Windows XP-based, the multicast audio and video streams can even be encrypted to prevent the possibility of eavesdropping.

SP2 Caveats

To install Exchange 2000 Server SP2, the server must first be running Windows 2000 SP2. Before installing either of the service packs, organizations should be aware of the following caveats.

No Uninstall. SP2 has no Uninstall feature, so the only way to back out is to overwrite the server with a backup tape created before the upgrade.

Coexistence. Servers running Exchange 2000 SP2 can coexist with servers running Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000, and Exchange 2000 SP1. However, an Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2000 SP1 front-end server cannot access an Exchange 2000 SP2 back-end server. Some of the new Conferencing Server security features require SP2 to be installed on all participating servers.

Still no spell checker. OWA still lacks one of the most requested features, spell checker support.

No slipstream support. Neither service pack can be "slipstreamed" into the Exchange 2000 Server or Conferencing Server installation files. New Exchange servers must still be built in two steps.

Reboot may be needed. Although in most cases SP2 can be applied without rebooting the Exchange server, updates performed using Terminal Services absolutely requires rebooting each updated server. Furthermore, organizations that use custom components, scripts, and applications that rely on Exchange resources (such as Exchange Collaborative Data Objects) may also have to reboot their Exchange servers.

Availability and Resources

Exchange 2000 Service Pack 2 is available for customers worldwide to download at www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2000/sp2.

North American customers also can call (800) 826-8080 to order the service packs on CD.

A comprehensive list of new features and a list of hotfixes that have been rolled into the service packs are available at www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2000/sp2.asp.

The "Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 2 Deployment Guide" can be obtained at www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/deployment/2000/SP2Deply.doc.