I spent most of this last weekend (and eventually into the week) upgrading my house and office to Vista. In total I upgraded 3 servers and a laptop, and synchronised all of my content using one of the best new tools in Vista, robocopy.

It made me realise that doing a manual upgrade to Exchange 2007, Office 2007, or Vista is not for the faint of heart.

My new Lenovo T60 laptop came preloaded with Windows XP. It was great - turn on the power, push the power (aka Easy Button), and an hour later my Vista environment and all of the third party applications I like were configured and installed. I then inserted the Windows Vista DVD, waited two hours, realised the update process wasn't working because wireless isn't automatically configured, plugged it in, and waited another 2 hours for 80MB of drivers to be downloaded from Microsoft.

The Year 2007 Problem

January 19, 2007

Slipping silently under the radar screen of many companies has been the upcoming changes to Daylight Savings Time, scheduled to impact systems the second week in March 2007. Much like in the months preceding the turn of the century, many business systems, including Microsoft Exchange 2007, will require updates to address hard-coded dependencies in Microsoft software. We're calling this the "Year 2007" problem here at Azaleos.

In 1999, I was given a plaque labeled "Year 2000: Use in case of Emergency" --- with an easily detachable pencil for use if all of the computers were to go down due to the change in the millenium impacting systems. We all might need to sharpen our pencils now and remember that time once again.

Network World Article: Exchange 2007 facing integration issues with other Microsoft software - January 11, 2007

Read the Full Article...

As Microsoft updates the individual key components of its enterprise software, integrating those pieces is proving challenging.

The issues center on Exchange 2007 and its relationship to Vista, released late last year along with Exchange to corporate users, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and the forthcoming Longhorn Server, slated to ship by the end of the year. In a nutshell, Exchange 2007 can't run on Microsoft's most current virtualization software, Exchange's management tools won't run on the just released Vista desktop operating system and the 64-bit messaging server is not compatible with Microsoft's forthcoming 64-bit server operating system called Longhorn...

Happy New Year from Azaleos, and best wishes for 2007!

In this issue:

• Azaleos adds over 10,000 e-mail users to OneStop Services in 2006
• Azaleos begins international expansion into Canada, South America, Europe, and Asia
• History of Azaleos published in Redmond Channel Partner magazine
• Microsoft Exchange Cost Calculator made available on www.azaleos.com
• Azaleos V2 releases Oct 23rd, adding rich functionality for E-Mail Archiving, Monitoring, Reporting, Remote Mgmt, and Disaster Recovery – and preparing our customers for Exchange 2007
• Welcome to our newest customers: Coinstar, Fortify Software, Clark Nuber, Golf Savings Bank, Allegheny Technologies (additional site), First American Bank, CIEE
  

There are a few major changes regarding Exchange 2007 licensing that create differences from previous releases of Exchange. According to our read of the latest information on Microsoft's sites, this is a summary of the changes as we interpret them. For definitive information, contact Microsoft or read the articles linked to in the "Sources" section below.

1. Outlook 2007 is no longer included as part of the Exchange Standard CAL ($67). Outlook 2007 must be purchased separately ($109.95) or as part of Office 2007. Customers who bought Software assurance on Exchange 2003 before November 30, 2006 receive a free upgrade to Outlook 2007.