Feature Summary

• Protection for Windows clients, while they are online or offline, with easy-to-use wizards for establishing protection, retention and alert schedules. A single DPM server can protect over 1,000 Windows clients, while end users are able to restore their own data using Windows Explorer or Microsoft Office.
• Protection of Microsoft Virtualization platforms, including Hyper-V R2 Live Migration / Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) configurations. DPM can also restore single-file items from host-based VM backups.
• Enhanced Protection for SQL Server, scaling to over 2,000 databases per DPM server, and offering auto-protection of new databases per SQL instance. DBA’s can now restore their own databases, through a self-service restore utility for SQL Server.
• Enhanced Protection of Exchange Server, scaling to over 40TB of email and support for Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAG), as well as CCR/SCR in Exchange 2007.
• Enhanced Protection for SharePoint, without the requirement for a recovery farm with SharePoint 2010, and scaling up to 25TB farms with over 1M items. New content databases are now auto-protected without administrator interaction.
• DPM 2010 is truly enterprise-ready, scaling to over 100 servers with over 80TB per DPM server, and includes new Auto-grow, Auto-heal, Auto-protect features for a lights-out reliable protection and recovery solution

Download the System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 Trial here: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/data-protection-manager/dpm-try-it.aspx#Down

System Center Essentials 2010 provides IT professionals a unified physical and virtual management experience.

Microsoft® System Center Essentials 2010 provides IT professionals in mid-sized organizations, a unified physical and virtual management experience. It enables you to better secure, update, monitor, and troubleshoot from a single console, so you can efficiently and proactively manage your IT environment.

Feature Summary

• By providing a single solution with a single console for managing your physical and virtual servers, client computers, hardware, software, and IT services for a unified experience. Integrated physical and virtual management means fewer tools to learn, a streamlined management system, and reduced administrative tasks.
• By enabling you to proactively manage your IT environment with smart alert notifications of IT issues, providing expert diagnostic information to accelerate problem diagnosis and integrated tasks to quickly resolve issues before they cause downtime.
• By being easy to deploy and maintain, simplifying complex management tasks, like creation of virtual servers, software deployment, update management, and inventory collection for increased IT efficiency and security.

Download System Center Essentials 2010 Trial here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee470677.aspx

the following products are now avaliable for download:

• Project Professional 2010 (x64) – (English) 272 (MB)
• Project Professional 2010 (x86) – (English) 235 (MB)
• Project Standard 2010 (x64) – (English) 245 (MB)
• Project Standard 2010 (x86) – (English) 223 (MB)
• Office Professional Plus 2010 (x64) – (English) 718 (MB)
• Office Professional Plus 2010 (x86) – (English) 650 (MB)
• SharePoint Server 2010 (x64) – DVD (English) 723 (MB)
• Visio 2010 (x64) – (English) 343 (MB)
• Visio 2010 (x86) – (English) 293 (MB)
• Office Web Apps 2010 (x64) – DVD (English) 200 (MB)

In a time when your organization requires its communication tools to be cost-effective and flexible, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 enables you to achieve new levels of reliability and performance by delivering features that simplify your administration, help protect your communications, and delight your users by meeting their demands for greater business mobility.

Microsoft Exchange, the cornerstone of Microsoft’s unified communications solution, has long been the choice of organizations like yours to enable rich and productive collaboration among its users. The latest release of Exchange can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange delivers the widest range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities, that combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available.

Flexible and Reliable

The pressure to optimize your IT infrastructure for ever-changing business conditions requires you to be agile and that means investing in solutions that provide you and your organization choice. Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment based on your unique needs and a simplified way to help keep e-mail continuously available for your users.

With Exchange, choose from on-premises deployment with Exchange Server 2010, a Microsoft hosted service with Exchange Online, or a seamless mix of both. Microsoft’s commitment to Software plus Services ensures you can decide on your timeline for taking advantage of the flexibility and power of both without interrupting or changing your users’ experience.

Exchange Server has always provided and continues to provide you the choice of a wider range of storage hardware options than any other solution, ranging from traditional Storage Area Networks (SAN) to low-cost, desktop-class Direct Attached Storage (DAS). In the latest release, continued innovation in the Exchange mailbox database means that you will experience up to a 50% reduction in disk IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) over Exchange Server 2007, as well as greater resiliency against data corruption.

Anywhere Access

The success of your business hinges on your ability to make your users more productive and effective through the technology solutions you deliver. Exchange Server 2010 helps your users get more done by giving them the freedom to securely access all of their communications – e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and more – from virtually any platform, Web-browser, or device through industry standard protocols. Your users live their business lives in their inboxes every day. For so many organizations, Exchange has been the foundation of a universal inbox.

Enhancements in the latest release of Exchange provide your users access to all of their communications from a single location while making it easier for them to collaborate with each other and their business partners. The ever-growing flow of information into and out of an individual’s inbox daily can create overload and affect productivity and profitability. Exchange 2010 adds new productivity features that can help your users more easily organize and prioritize the communications in their inboxes.

Protection and Compliance

In today’s increasingly regulated environment, it has become critical to efficiently preserve business records. This includes e-mail which has quickly become the principle source of data in legal discovery and other compliance-related investigations.

But managing e-mail for compliance has become particularly challenging for most organizations. The problem is that, as e-mail volume grows beyond inbox storage limits, users are often forced to move this mail off e-mail servers and onto PCs and laptops as PST (personal storage) files. This isolates e-mail, making it more difficult to manage and search in a way that meets compliance requirements.

To address this PST problem and ease the compliance burden, Exchange 2010 delivers new, integrated e-mail archiving and retention functionality–including granular multi-mailbox search and immediate legal hold. When you combine this with the flexibility provided by the Exchange storage architecture, you can take better control of your corporate information, while providing your users with a streamlined experience that does not disrupt the way they manage their inboxes every day.

Release

Exchange 2010 public release is scheduled for the 09.11.2009. So stay tuned.

Introduction
DirectAccess is a new feature in the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that gives users the experience of being seamlessly connected to their corporate network any time they have Internet access. With DirectAccess, users are able to access corporate resources (such as e-mail, shared folders, or intranet Web sites) securely without connecting to a virtual private network (VPN).

On the next lines i want to share my first experience and the steps on howto setup both services on the same server.

Deploying Forefront TMG on a DirectAccess Server
DirectAccess traffic is IPv6-based; since by default Forefront TMG does not accept any IPv6 traffic or allows it to pass through it, the following traffic will be allowed in order to support DirectAccess traffic:

• Inbound authenticated IPv6 traffic (using IPSec). This also includes the IPSec initiation traffic.
• Inbound and outbound IPv6 transition technologies (6to4, Teredo, IP-HTTPS and ISATAP).
• Native IPv6 from the Forefront TMG machine.

In addition, Forefront TMG integrates with the IPSec Denial of Service Protection (DoSP) component of Windows DirectAccess to ensure that only IPSec traffic is allowed through it. For this reason, it is important to configure DirectAccess before installing Forefront TMG.

Configure and verify Windows DirectAccess
Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on a server and configure DirectAccess as described in the DirectAccess Early Adopter’s guide.

Since DirectAccess configuration involves multiple technologies and servers, it is highly recommended to verify that DirectAccess has been configured and is working properly before continuing to install Forefront TMG.

Install Forefront TMG
After you have successfully installed the Forefront TMG Server you have to configure the “Act as Direct Access Server Option” in the “Configure IP Preferences” section. This can be found in the navigation tree section “Intrusion Prevention System”.

After activating the checkbox the following system policies will be enabled/allowed.

Now you have to create an Access Rule to allow “IPv6 Over IPv4 Tunnel” Protocol to travel from the TMG-Server/DirectAccess Server to your internal network.

That’s it. Now you can use both services combined together on one box.

Since a couple of days the SP2 for Microsoft Exchange is available for download on the Microsoft Website. With the release of SP2 it will be possible to migrate to Exchange Server 2010 in the future.

I already did some upgrades to SP2. There is one important thing you should know. If you are using the Unified Messaging role with language packs different to the english one you’ll have to deinstall them before the upgrade to SP2. After the upgrade you can install them again…Oh wait, you need the correct version of the language packs. At the moment there are no SP2 language packs available. So you will have to stay with SP1 or upgrade to SP2 and stay by the english builtin language pack and install your language as soon as it gets published on the Microsoft website: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb330845.aspx At the moment there is no release date published.

It is very likely that Microsoft will release the Exchange Server 2010 RC1 for public download this week.

New features will be:

• MailTips
• Voice Mail Preview
• Conversation Views
• Call Answering Rules
• MobilePhone-SMS Integration

So, get ready to download and start testing.