I took a moment to play with Beta 2 of Exchange Server 2007 recently; it's been out a while, but there's been so much going on that I haven't had a chance. In a word - awesome! I'm really enthusiastic about the improvements and new features - Unified Messaging should make a huge impact on many organisations ... voice access to mailboxes, and especially the voice recognition, is really a great inclusion. Voicemail and fax integration are also great and could really change organisations in a way that I think Live Communications Server also has potential to achieve.

There's a lot of good to be said about it, and I couldn't pretend to have familiarised myself with everything - I haven't even reached the stage of building an XP or Vista VM with Office 2007 to look at the client end. But there are a couple of concerns for me.

The first is that they have dropped support for the Active Directory Users & Computers add-in. There are stated reasons for this, which I'm sure are valid, but I do wonder about whether the Exchange team is considering their client base adequately. I've encountered plenty of organisations that live inside AD Users & Computers; in fact, many are lucky enough to only need that one tool for creation and management of users.

In this case, the change to managing mailboxes within the Exchange Management Console is a frustrating and bewildering one. This adds an additional layer of complexity that's frankly unnecessary. You could certainly create a user from within the console - but you get no control over the OU in which a user is placed, nor the ability to set their groups or other attributes. So then you'll use AD Users & Computers anyway.

I'm definitely in favour of a choice being available - let those for whom the Exchange Management Console suits use it that way. But anyone who has worked in or managed a helpdesk - or any team that's responsible for provisioning users - would surely know what I mean. One more console means more overhead and more complexity. I could be wrong, but I can't help thinking this won't be a popular design choice for many smaller organisations.

The other problem I have is inconsistency in policies. Managed Folder Mailbox policies (effectively a replacement for Mailbox Manager) and ActiveSync policies are set on a per-user basis. I can see definite advantages in this approach over Exchange 2003 - for example, the ability to differentiate ActiveSync policy on a per user basis. However it seems that if they are not manually set at the time of user creation, they do not get applied.

Contrast this with email address policies, which are set appropriately by default for new users, and which can automatically update all users on change.

The most likely result of this is extra overhead for administrators. The last thing an administrator needs is something that was previously automatic becoming a manual process! Why not include the ability to assign policies to groups, to set defaults for new users, and to re-apply policy on change?

There's certainly room for argument that the new and powerful scripting abilities incorporated into Exchange 2007 could achieve the necessary tasks for both of my concerns. But it's command-line scripting, and even if you schedule it or automate it some other way, I still don't think it likely to be desirable for a reasonable percentage of customers. I'd certainly prefer these to be addressed in the GUI from the outset.

Realistically - it's a beta product for now. Feature lists have a habit of changing before release. That tends to be based on feedback, so if enough people don't like a feature, or lack thereof, there's every chance it will make it in. I have every hope that these problems will be addressed - but if not, well, it's looking like a great product anyway, and hopefully it won't be too hard to work around them!