First, I am happy to annouce that Exchange Server 2003 SP2 *will* be support within a virtualized environment starting with the release of Virtual Server 2005 R2. See this link for more info.

Configuring SMTP for both Authenticated and Anonymous Connections at Microsoft — Detailed discussion on how Microsoft IT enabled its internal SMTP servers to serve both authenticated and specific, per-IP anonymous connections.

What’s New in Exchange Server 2003 — This guide provides important information about using Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. The purpose of this guide is to outline the features in Exchange Server 2003 and provide the basic information necessary to begin using these new features. This is not a comprehensive document about Exchange, but a guide for getting started with testing and running Exchange 2003.  This guide supplements the release notes (releasenotes.htm), and should be read only after reviewing the release notes. The release notes contain critical information about known issues with Exchange 2003.  This guide is designed to benefit Exchange administrators who will be testing and deploying Exchange 2003. Furthermore, this guide assumes that you have an excellent working knowledge of Exchange 2000. Its structure is based on Exchange components; specifically, each chapter itemizes the new component features and discusses how to begin using them.

Update for Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter – KB906173 — You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article Description of the Update for Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter (KB906173).

Note: Users of Indonesian, Malay, Urdu, and Vietnamese language versions of Outlook 2003 can download and install office2003-kb904631-fullfile-enu.exe. Refer to the Instructions section below for details.

Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) — Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) offers new features and improvements to Exchange Server 2003. New features include support for mobility and message hygiene. Improvements have been made to address performance and reliability with public folders and with database size restrictions.

New for mobility is direct push, which is an Exchange technology that maintains an open connection between the mobile device and the server. Remote wipe is another new feature, and it enables administrators to delete sensitive data from a lost or stolen mobile device. Other features include global address list (GAL) lookup, policy provisioning whereby administrators can make supported policies more secure, support for certificate-based authentication, use of S/MIME to sign and encrypt mail, and server-based synchronization of Tasks.

Anti-spam improvements are included in the release of the integrated version 2 of Microsoft Exchange Intelligent Message Filter, and Sender ID, which is an industry-standard framework. Version 2 of Intelligent Message Filter contains significant improvements in the anti-spam area for SP2.

For Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition, the hard-coded licensing database size limit has been increased from 16 GB to 75 GB. The administrator can set a protective database size limit (prevent unintentional database size growth). The default value will be 18 GB in SP2 for Standard Edition and the default can be changed.

Public folders are now more manageable. Administrators can now track who deleted public folders, stop and resume public folder replication, synchronize the public folder hierarchy, propagate access control list (ACL) changes through public folder hierarchy, and propagate replica list changes through the public hierarchy. Many of the improvements work toward minimizing the effect of replication storms.

There is a new version of the offline address book (OAB 4.0) that features the reduction in the OAB size, differential OAB update files, indexing based on locale setting, and improved diagnostic logging.

 

Cheers!