The Microsoft Exchange Team yesterday announced the upcoming release of Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). As one would expect, SP1 will include fixes and tweaks including a roll-up of the roll-ups released to date. There will also be several feature enhancements, here is an overview of some of these:

• Improvements to the Multi-Mailbox Search: search preview, search result de-duplication & annotation of reviewed items.
• Outlook Web App: Improved reading experience, users will also be able to share their calendars to anonymous viewers via the web (assuming you enable this), the reading pane can be placed on the bottom or the right side.
• Mobility: Support for send-as, full implementation of conversation view, and more..
• Several new management UI enhancements including: RBAC role management in ECP, Configure MailTips in ECP, Configure Transport Rules in ECP, Configure Database Availability Group (DAG) IP Addresses and Alternate Witness Server in EMC, Recursive public folder settings management (including permissions) in EMC

While these are all great feature improvements, I thought I would call out the two that I am very excited about. There are two things that always come up when I talk to customers about Exchange Server 2010 and the integrated archiving capabilities. The first is the lack of ability to provision a user's personal archive to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox. The second is that users are unable to access their personal archives from Outlook 2007. The good news is that SP1 will enable the support of both these. Thanks guys!

Exchange 2010 SP1 is due for release later this year.