One of the most important improvements in Exchange 2010 in my opinion is the new toolkit that allows administrators to implement policies that works with Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web Access too. The fact is offers many different tools that make Email Hosting better and easier to manage.
This is a significant step forward, as previously OWA was something of a unsubtle beast. You could either restrict access to mailboxes altogether or it was open season on emails. Now policies can be enforced across the board, whatever client the users prefer.
The Transport Protection Rules enable Exchange administrators to create rules that control every aspect of email, from content restrictions, size, approved recipients for sensitive emails, no copy and pasting and other neat tricks. While most of these features have been around in other incarnations, they have never been so easy to implement or ever worked with Outlook Web Access. The TPR system is new to Exchange 2010 and a welcome addition to the platform.
In a real life example of the TPR in action, say a project manager send a detailed email to his team listing a new product, it’s benefits, features and proposed release date. He can mark he email confidential so his people knew not to share it, which has always been the case. The mail would have a flag on it marking it as confidential.
Now, with Transport Protection Rules, Exchange can enforce a policy on confidential emails that includes not being able to forward them, copy and paste to or from them and other niceties. This means if someone absent mindedly forwarded it as part of a conversation the Exchange server would refuse. This is a significant step forward in information security, and allows administrators to control the flow of information with much more granularity than before.
Drilling deeper into the Transport Protection Rules, it’s also possible to restrict emails, by email address, location, recipient, whether it’s internal or external and a raft of other criteria. It also works seamlessly with Outlook Web Access too. Which is handy because Office 2010 doesn’t even have a release date yet.
The biggest bonus with these rules, and the closer integration with OWA is that everything will work with browsers other than Internet Explorer. No more will you need plugins to be able to enforce rules, or add functionality. Everything works out of the box, so Opera, Firefox or Safari users will also have full access to the available features, and also be subject to the Transport Protection Rules.
The Exchange 2010 was the largest beta Microsoft have ever run. From where I’m sitting, it was worth every minute. They have listened to feedback and integrated many of the improvements into the new system. While it’s still a big, cumbersome beast, it’s now a bit more manageable at least.
