It's ready people - exchange 2007 has been released to manufacture

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After much waiting it's finally here - Microsoft Exchange 2007 was Released to Manufacture (RTM) on Friday 8th December 2007. It will be appearing on the TechNet Plus (and MSDN) subscriber download area soon.

The release announcement is available here.

For me the coolest feature of Exchange 2007 is the integration with Live Communications Server giving Unified Communications - you can speak to your mailbox on the telephone and even re-schedule meetings!

Another really cool feature (for security geeks at least!) is the facility to proxy Sharepoint content via Outlook Web Access meaning that your users can access file based content from your internal network WITHOUT establishing a VPN connection.

I've always liked Outlook connecting to Exchange via RPC over HTTP(S) as it dramatically reduces your attack surface - no need for a VPN connection hence only email traffic can travel between your PC and the internal network. Like many of you I've been frustrated that many emails I receive reference files and shares on the corporate network hence I've had to fire up my VPN connection to read them. With Exchange 2007 this problem has finally gone away!!!

Exchange 2007 also includes the facility to render Office documents (hosted on the corporate network) via the browser when connecting via Outlook Web Access - so no longer do you need to worry about remote users leaving documents on kiosk machines.

It's all good :-)