Adam's Mindspace

We've implemented it in our organisation. The biggest benefit for us was with the management of public folders. We currently have around 70,000 folders spread across 4 dedicated public folder servers in 3 routing groups. This came about as we merged 5 separate Exchange 5.5 orgs who were all heavy folder users.

We're working to clean up, consolidate and move to new hardware so the new features for managing replicas and permissions are invaluable. You can see a brief post on our experiences here: http://www.drewery.net/blog/2005/12/13/public-folders-sp2/

I upgraded only a few weeks after it came out, and have seen no problems. My main reason was for the new Intelligent Message Filter. It is currently my only UCE detection tool, and it successfully identifies 95% of spam. I have not played with the Sender ID portion, but it sounds like it would allow me to identify originating server IPs, and exclude my external SMTP servers from being rejected.

Windows Mobile 5 support was also upgraded and I have been testing several devices with it. It has a lot of enhanced ActiveSync features and SP2 fixed some of the bugs I was seeing.

Another HUGE benifit was the Storage Group limit! It moved from 16GB (17GB if you needed a quick fix) to 75GB. I have 2 Standard versions of Exchange, and 1 Enterprise. This was a big deal to me because I don't have quotas, so more storage space the better.

Reasons to wait? You need to make sure your system is running flawless. Don't try to upgrade while your having issues sending mail. Make sure any Exchange related 3rd party services support SP2. Legato EmailXtender just announced support this week and I know Blackberry is supported. There is no rollback/uninstall. Backup EVERYTHING before doing the upgrade. I didn't have any issues and I don't know anyone who has, but good to be on the safe side of things.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

We implemented SP2 on two Clusters, and some Single Servers - no Problems so far.

But I'am disappointed about one thing:

Since Exchange 5.5 I wonder why MS isn't raising the maximum possible Quota for Mailbox size. Since than it is 2 GB!

Each new SP for Exchange I hoped the GUI would allow a higher Value - but it doesnot. I know - it is possible whith ADSI-Edit but thats not what I want.