With 26 days left in calendar year 2011, the Exchange team at Microsoft stayed true to their word, and have delivered an early Christmas present to email admins all over the world. Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 has arrived! We’ve covered some of the things you could expect with the latest service pack to Exchange 2010, both here and here, and offered advice on getting ready for testing the service pack in your environment, and extending the schema as required for this service pack.

Service Pack 2 includes all the update from the release of Exchange 2010 RTM through Rollup 6, so some of you may be asking yourselves if you really need to rush right out and apply SP2. As with any patch or update, testing is required, so a measured and careful pacing is far better than a rush, but there’s a lot of great stuff inside SP2 that should appeal to you. Here’s the list from the TechNet article What’s New in Exchange 2010 SP2.

Hybrid Configuration Wizard

Exchange 2010 SP2 introduces the Hybrid Configuration Wizard which provides you with a streamlined process to configure a hybrid deployment between on-premises and Office 365 Exchange organizations. Hybrid deployments provide the seamless look and feel of a single Exchange organization and offer administrators the ability to extend the feature-rich experience and administrative control of an on-premises organization to the cloud. For more information, see Understanding the Hybrid Configuration Wizard.

Address Book Policies

Exchange 2010 SP2 introduces the address book policy object which can be assigned to a mailbox user. The ABP determines the global address list (GAL), offline address book (OAB), room list, and address lists that are visible to the mailbox user that is assigned the policy. Address book policies provide a simpler mechanism to accomplish GAL separation for the on-premises organization that needs to run disparate GALs. For more information, see Understanding Address Book Policies.

Cross-Site Silent Redirection for Outlook Web App

With Exchange 2010 SP2, you can enable a silent redirection when a Client Access server receives a client request that is better serviced by a Client Access server located in another Active Directory site. This silent redirection can also provide a single sign-on experience when forms-based authentication is enabled on each Client Access server. For more information, see Understanding Proxying and Redirection.

Mini Version of Outlook Web App

The mini version of Outlook Web App is a lightweight browser-based client, similar to the Outlook Mobile Access client in Exchange 2003. It’s designed to be used on a mobile operating system. The mini version of Outlook Web App provides users with the following basic functionality:

• Access to e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks and the global address list.
• Access to e-mail subfolders.
• Compose, reply to, and forward e-mail messages.
• Create and edit calendar, contact, and task items.
• Handle meeting requests.
• Set the time zone and automatic reply messages.

For more information, see Understanding the Mini Version of Outlook Web App.

Mailbox Replication Service

In Exchange 2010 SP1, if you wanted to move mailboxes from on-premises to Outlook.com or to another forest, you had to enable MRSProxy on the remote Client Access server. To do this, you had to manually configure the web.config file on every Client Access server. In Exchange 2010 SP2, two parameters have been added to the New-WebServicesVirtualDirectory and Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory cmdlets so that you don’t have to perform the manual configuration: MRSProxyEnabled and MaxMRSProxyConnections. For more information, see Start the MRSProxy Service on a Remote Client Access Server.

Mailbox Auto-Mapping

In Exchange 2010 SP1, Office Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 clients can automatically map to any mailbox to which a user has Full Access permissions. If a user is granted Full Access permissions to another user’s mailbox or to a shared mailbox, Outlook, through Autodiscover, automatically loads all mailboxes to which the user has full access. However, if the user has full access to a large number of mailboxes, performance issues may occur when starting Outlook. Therefore, in Exchange 2010 SP2, administrators can turn off the auto-mapping feature by setting the value of the new Automapping parameter to false on the Add-MailboxPermission cmdlets. For more information, see Disable Outlook Auto-Mapping with Full Access Mailboxes.

Multi-Valued Custom Attributes

Exchange 2010 SP2 introduces five new multi-value custom attributes that you can use to store additional information for mail recipient objects. The ExtensionCustomAttribute1 to ExtensionCustomAttribute5 parameters can each hold up to 1,300 values. You can specify multiple values as a comma-delimited list. The following cmdlets support these new parameters:

• Set-DistributionGroup
• Set-DynamicDistributionGroup
• Set-Mailbox
• Set-MailContact
• Set-MailPublicFolder
• Set-RemoteMailbox

Litigation Hold

In Exchange 2010 SP2, you can’t disable or remove a mailbox that has been placed on litigation hold. To bypass this restriction, you must either remove litigation hold from the mailbox, or use the new IgnoreLegalHold switch parameter when removing or disabling the mailbox. The IgnoreLegalHold parameter has been added to the following cmdlets:

• Disable-Mailbox
• Remove-Mailbox
• Disable-RemoteMailbox
• Remove-RemoteMailbox
• Disable-MailUser
• Remove-MailUser

You can download SP2 from this link http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28190. At 535 MB, it isn’t the smallest update you have ever had to download. It comes down as an EXE, so saving it to a common location that all of your Exchange servers can access will keep you from having to do multiple downloads. Remember, both during testing, and when it comes time for production deployment, patching should follow this order for servers:

1. Client Access Servers (all servers in a CAS array consecutively)
2. Hub Transport Servers
3. Unified Messaging Servers
4. Mailbox Servers
5. Edge Transport Servers (which can actually be done whenever, but it makes sense to leave them to last just for consistency).

I’m not saying Steve Balmer is a jolly old elf, but Santa’s helpers on the Exchange team worked very hard on SP2, and it’s the best early Christmas present I’ve gotten this year. Now, off to submit that change request!

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