Most of the enhancements center around archiving/discovery, Outlook Web App (OWA) and mobile management. There will be a beta of SP1 for download in parallel with TechEd North America this June, giving administrators a chance to test it in their development environments prior to full production.

In Exchange Server 2010 last November, Microsoft introduced integrated archiving capabilities aimed at helping preserve old e-mail data. In SP1, administrators can now provision a user’s Personal Archive to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox. This allows admins to separate storage strategies (or tiered storage) for less frequently accessed e-mail. There will also be an update that will enable support to access Personal Archives with Outlook 2007. Also coming are new tools to allow admins to import historical e-mail data from .PST files, directly into Exchange. There are also new console tools to automate common archiving tasks, as well as policy tags to give more flexibility in designing retention strategy, as well as improvements to mailbox search to conduct discovery of e-mail.

Outlook Web App will get major updates, including new interface enhancements. OWA will do a better job of prefetching message content, allowing the OWA reading experience to flow faster. Functions like delete, mark as read, and other interface options will now run asynchronously so that they feel instantaneous to the user. The interface has also been de-cluttered and updated to help find common tasks faster, and easier to read on small screens like netbooks. Microsoft has also improved support for Safari on the Mac. There will also be new themes for OWA allowing the user to customize their experience.

Improvements to Exchange Active Sync include tether-free IRM support, support for send-as, full support for conversation view including the ability to sync only unique parts of the message. They’ve also added a support page inside of OWA that will help guide the user in setting up their device by providing information such as server names for EAS, IMAP, SMTP, etc.

Microsoft will also be revamping the Exchange management user interface. Users who are not as proficient with PowerShell will be able to do a lot of tasks that were previously only available there, in the Exchange Control Panel. A few of these options include:

• Create/configure Retention Tags + Retention Policies in EMC
• Configure Transport Rules in ECP
• Configure Journal Rules in ECP
• Configure MailTips in ECP
• Provision and configure the Personal Archive in ECP
• Configure Litigation Hold in ECP & EMC
• Configure Allow/Block/Quarantine mobile device policies in ECP
• RBAC role management in ECP
• Configure Database Availability Group (DAG) IP Addresses and Alternate Witness Server in EMC
• Recursive public folder settings management (including permissions) in EMC

Exchange 2010 is already a great product, and it looks like Microsoft has a lot of big improvements coming with this service pack.

The Deployment Assistant allows administrators to create Exchange 2010 deployment instructions that are customized to their environment. The Deployment Assistant asks a small set of questions, and based on your answers, it provides a set of instructions that are designed to get you up and running on Exchange 2010. Instead of reading dozens of topics in the Exchange 2010 library, you simply answer a few questions, and the Deployment Assistant gives you customized content to install Exchange 2010.

The assistant is strictly web based, and does not require you to run anything on your systems. It does require you to have intimate knowledge of your Exchange environment for the results to be very helpful. You can find it over at Technet.

Microsoft has released, through the PowerPoint Team Blog, a new video and some details about some of the updates PowerPoint 2010 will be receiving. The team says this will be the biggest visual update to the product in the last 10 years. PowerPoint’s graphics engine has been rebuilt to take advantage of 3D accelerated graphics cards by using DirectX. Through hardware acceleration, they’re able to add new transition and animation effects. They’ve also added a new timelines UI, animations choreography and painter.

Another feature which was highlighted last week, is a new Protected View, which allows PowerPoint and other Office applications to run in a sandbox when downloading and opening presentations from the Internet. This allows potential malicious code to be isolated and contained within the file. More information on that feature can be found over at the Office 2010 Engineering Blog.

There are 25 events across the country so I am sure there is one near you. Sorry international folks, Microsoft will not be holding similar events abroad.

For more information or to register for an event, visit the Microsoft event home page.

“It is an exciting time for the MacBU with updates to our current products and the first public announcement about the next version of Office for Mac. For several years we have focused on providing the best Microsoft Exchange client for the Mac, and the Web Services Edition delivers that today for Entourage users,” said Eric Wilfrid, general manager for the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft.

While Office for Mac builds on the work done with Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition, Microsoft says it’s more than just a name change. With full support for Exchange synchronization, Office for Mac will also deliver significant changes to better interface with Mac OS X including a new high-speed file-based database with support Time Machine and Spotlight and fully Cocoa based programming.