*Note! Comments have been disabled for this post. To comment on this post, please visit the Exchange Software Updates forum which deals with issues encountered in updates we release for Exchange. We will be monitoring the forums every day to assist you in applying this roll-up. Thanks for keeping your servers updated to the latest and greatest to take full advantage of our cumulative servicing model!
We have released Update Roll-up 7 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB 960384) to the download center. The release of the roll-up via Microsoft Update will happen on March 24.
Yes, it has been only 5 weeks since we shipped the last update roll-up on February 10 and usually our gap between roll-ups is about eight weeks. Since the release of update roll-up 6, we have fixed about 50 issues and wanted to go ahead and provide them to customers. How did this happen in a short span of 5 weeks? I am not inflating the figures. Actually, the last roll-up was special since it included the fix for a security issue as described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-003. The test pass for that roll-up lasted much longer since all security related updates released by Microsoft go through a Security Update Validation Program (SUVP). As part of this program, the security updates are made available to a limited group of customers to test before its release on a second Tuesday. More on this program can be found at the MSRC blog here. As a result we had a shorter time available for including fixes in that roll-up. This also ensured a lower risk for the roll-up since the amount of code churn was lower. Of course, all this meant that we had more time on our hands to work on the development and testing for this roll-up and we are now ready a little earlier.
Now for the part which I like! Announcing some of the important fixes included in this roll-up to improve the customer experience:
- First off, we fixed the SCR issue which have caused everyone some pain and which did not get completed in time to be included in the last update roll-up.
KB 961281 Update Roll-up 5 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 introduced an issue where you receive an error when attempting to enable SCR on a storage group if the environment has a parent domain -> child domain active directory structure. Tim has blogged about this over here. This is now fixed. Additionally, there are also 2 other SCR related issues which we have been addressed in this roll-up and have been asked for by many customers.
KB 957834 Network shares are deleted and created intermittently by the replication service on an Exchange SCC cluster when SCR is enabled on the Exchange server
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KB 958331 Restore-StorageGroupCopy command may fail in an Exchange Server 2007 SCR environment.
- We have also fixed two issues which caused intermittent crashes in the IMAP4 service and resulted in event 4999 being logged in the event logs. The following KBs have more information on the scenarios which are fixed: KB 957504 and KB 960292.
Additionally we have also done a design change to address encapsulation and the way it is handled by Exchange Server 2007. If you would like to read the official version of this design change, you can read KB 956069. Of course for a lighter and funnier perspective on this, I will recommend Jason's blog post released as a run up to this roll-up release.
Oh! And I almost forgot. Thanks to the folks who helped provide service startup logs via the forums when they encountered an issue where some services would be left disabled after patch installation. The logs helped us identify a missed case when starting the MSExchangeTransportLogSearch service which would happen in scenarios where the server has more than one Exchange role installed on it.
KB 960384 has more details about this release and a complete list of all fixes included in this roll-up.
And finally, from the installation perspective, a friendly reminder that the roll-up installer will overwrite any OWA script files if required to ensure proper operation of OWA. So if you have customized the logon.aspx page or other similar OWA pages, you will need to redo any customization after installation of the roll-up. I promise, this is the last time I will remind everyone via the blog.
By the way, we will be disabling comments on this blog post. We have the Exchange Software Updates forum which deals with issues encountered in updates we release for Exchange. We will be monitoring the forums every day to assist you in applying this roll-up. Thanks for keeping your servers updated to the latest and greatest to take full advantage of our cumulative servicing model!
- Ananth Ramanathan
