10. Integration with Lync 2013
With
the release of Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft also has SharePoint 2013
and Lync 2013 that make up the rest of the Office 2013 servers family
of products. With the parallel development of the 2013 server products,
there’s tie-in together between the servers. For Lync 2013 integration,
organizations will find that Lync 2013 uses Exchange for the contact
store. Instead of having separate contacts for Lync and separate
contacts for Exchange, a shared contacts list stored in Exchange
simplifies the identification of individuals for users.
In
addition, Lync content is archived in Exchange Server 2013, which is an
extension of how “conversations” in Lync 2010 are saved in a
Conversation History folder in Exchange that tracks IM communications,
tracks incoming and outgoing phone calls in Lync, and identifies and
logs missed communications within the Conversation History folder.
Microsoft
is also supporting OAuth for authentication, a standard used heavily by
public cloud providers that allows for authentication as a service and
user impersonation when permitted, similar to how Facebook identities
and LinkedIn identities are shared across platforms.
11. Improving Unified Messaging in Exchange Server 2013
One
of the major improvements to Exchange Server 2010 was the updates to
Unified Messaging. Unified Messaging is the capability for Exchange
Server 2013 to be the voice mail server for an organization. Rather
than having a separate voice mail system connected to the
organization’s phone system, Exchange can be integrated into the phone
system to be able to take messages on incoming calls, and the messages
are stored in the user’s Exchange mailbox for playback from the phone
or by accessing the message from within Outlook, from within OWA, or
from a mobile device.
Unified Messaging is
not new to Exchange; in fact, many organizations, including Cisco,
Avaya, Shortel, and others, have had voice mail to Exchange add-ons for
years. Key to Microsoft’s Unified Messaging is that it is tightly
integrated in Exchange, requires no installation of special software,
leverages existing Exchange high-availability and failover
capabilities, and is not affected by patches or updates to Exchange.
With Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft has eliminated the dedicated
Unified Messaging server role and has folded the Unified Messaging
service right within the Exchange Server 2013 Mailbox server role.
With
the UM service built right in to the Exchange Mailbox server, the only
other service outside of the Mailbox server is the UM Call Router
service, which is installed on the Exchange Client Access server. The
UM Call Router proxies incoming calls. Being integrated directly with
Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft now provides improved CallerID lookup,
where CallerID in Exchange Server 2010 and prior looked only at the
default Contacts folder. Now with Exchange Server 2013, contact lookup is extended to look at other contact folders in Exchange as well.
One
of the benefits of Unified Messaging in Exchange from any vendor is the
concept of a single data store for inbound email messages and voice
mail messages. Rather than checking Outlook for emails, and calling
into a phone voice mail system for voice messages, having all messages
go in to Exchange provides a single point of message control. A single
point for message access allows Exchange Server 2013 to provide
anywhere access to all messages, whether it is from an Outlook client,
from OWA, or from a Windows Mobile device.
Unified
Messaging is significant in Exchange Server 2013 because it is the
foundation that Microsoft has built upon that provides unified
communications across its entire product line. Microsoft has been
tightly integrating instant messaging (IM), Voice over IP (VoIP)
telephone integration, videoconferencing, data conferencing, and so
forth into a complete, centralized communications system. With Exchange
Server 2013, Microsoft has standardized on the Unified Communications
Managed API (UCMA) v4.0 instead of the older v2.0 used in Exchange
Server 2010. UCMA v4.0 utilizes the same version of the speech engine
for text to speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) so that
the call attendant, call router, text to speech, voice mail
conversation to text are all utilizing the same API set. UCMA v4.0 also
provides improvements to grammar generation and language improvements.
Microsoft
has introduced several new products to the marketplace, including Lync
2013 and SharePoint 2013, that integrate technologies together in a
unified communications backbone. Exchange Server 2013 is the core to
the unified communications strategy that Microsoft is setting forth
because Exchange is the point of connection for email, contacts, remote
access, mobile access, and, now, voice communications.
12. Making Exchange Server 2013 Extremely Reliable and Recoverable
In
addition to security and mobility as core areas in which Microsoft has
invested heavily for all of its products, Microsoft has added
significant improvements in making Exchange Server 2013 more reliable
and more recoverable. As messaging has become critical to business
communications, Exchange Server 2013 becomes an important component in
making sure an organization can effectively communicate between
employees as well as from employees to customers, to vendors, to
business partners, and to the public. Add voice communications into the
new Exchange unified communications strategy, and it becomes even more
important that Exchange Server 2013 is extremely reliable.
With
Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft expanded the database availability
group (DAG) continuous replication technology that effectively allows
Exchange to hold up to 16 copies of a user’s
mailbox information. In the past, Exchange only had one copy of a
user’s mailbox sitting in an Exchange database. In the event that the
database holding the user’s information became corrupt or the server
holding the user’s information failed, the way to get the user’s
mailbox back up and running was to typically restore the data to
another server. Several hardware and software utility vendors have
created snapshot technologies that replicate a user’s mailbox
information to another server; however, as much as the user’s data can
be available on another system in another site, the user’s Outlook
client was still pointing to the old Exchange server where the mailbox
used to reside. So, as much as the data was available, business
continuity couldn’t continue until the user’s Outlook profile was
changed to redirect the user to the new location of the data.
With
Exchange Server 2010 and 2013, Microsoft has eliminated single copy
clusters, local continuous replication, Cluster Continuous Replication,
and standby continuous replication in place of an updated DAG
replication technology. DAGs still use log shipping as the method of
replication of information between servers. Log shipping means that the
1-MB log files that note the information written to an Exchange server
are transferred to other servers, and the logs are replayed on that
server to build up the content of the replica system from data known to
be accurate. If during a replication cycle a log file does not
completely transfer to the remote system, individual log transactions
are backed out of the replicated system and the information is re-sent.
Unlike bit-level transfers of data between source and destination used
in SANs or most other Exchange database replication solutions, if a
system fails, bits don’t transfer, and Exchange has no idea what the
bits were, what to request for a resend of data, or how to notify an
administrator what file or content the bits referenced. Microsoft’s
implementation of log shipping provides organizations a clean method of
knowing what was replicated and what was not.
In
addition, because log shipping is done with small 1-MB log files,
Exchange Server 2013 replication can be conducted over relatively
low-bandwidth connections. Dependent on the amount of data written to
an Exchange server, a T1 line can potentially be used to successfully
keep a source and destination replica server up to date. Other uses of
the DAG include staging the replication of data so that a third or
fourth copy of the replica resides offline in a remote data center so
that instead of having the data center actively be a failover
destination, the remote location can be used to simply be the point
where data is backed up to tape, or a location where data can be
recovered if a catastrophic enterprise environment failure occurs.
Another
major point about having data come live on a remote system is to
redirect a user’s Outlook clients to the location of his or her data.
With Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013, shown in Figure 8,
Microsoft no longer hard-codes the Mailbox server name to the user’s
Outlook profile, but rather has the user connect to the CAS with merely
the user’s logon name and password, and the CAS parses Active Directory
and Exchange and directs the user’s Outlook client to the appropriate
server that is currently hosting the user’s mailbox. This automatic
swap over at the client level provides the business continuity
functionality that is needed in a server failover scenario.
Figure 8. Outlook 2013 profile setting.
13.Improving Configuration, Administration, and Management Through the Exchange Management Shell
Improved
in Exchange Server 2013 is a command-line shell known as Exchange
Management Shell, or EMS. The command-line shell, shown in Figure 9,
provides an administrator the ability to configure, administer, and
manage an Exchange Server 2013 server environment using text commands
instead of solely a GUI. In fact with Exchange Server 2013, the
Exchange Administration Center is nothing more than a front end to the
Exchange Management Shell. Every EAC check box or pull-down function
executes an EMS script in the back end. Experience with Exchange Server
2013 has shown that only 80% to 90% of an administrator’s tasks can be
done through the Exchange Administration Center; however, on a regular
basis, the Exchange administrator has to do things through the scripted
interface because an EAC option does not exist.
Figure 9. Sample Exchange Management Shell interface.
Exchange
administrators have found that the EMS is very easy to use for
day-to-day tasks. For example, tasks such as adding mailboxes or moving
mailboxes used to require dozens of key clicks but can now be scripted
and simply cut/pasted into the EMS tool to be executed. As an example,
a common task is moving a mailbox to a different database. Through the
graphical management console, the task would take dozens of key clicks
to move the mailboxes of a group of users. With EMS, it just takes a
simple command such as:
Get-mailbox –server SERVER1 | move-mailbox -targetdatabase
"SERVER2\Mailbox Database 1"
By
creating a library of commands, an administrator can just search and
replace words such as server names, usernames, or other object data;
replace it in the command-line script; and then paste the script into
EMS to have it execute. EMS is not only a necessity to do many tasks
that are not available from the GUI, but it also makes administering
and managing Exchange Server 2013 much easier for redundant tasks or
for complex tasks that can be cut and pasted from a script library.
Although
EMS was included as early as the release of Exchange Server 2007, the
execution of commands in EMS typically had to be initiated from the
server in which the command was executed. With Exchange Server 2013 and
the use of PowerShell 3.0 remoting technologies, an EMS command can be
executed on one server with the effect taking place on another remote
server.
