This week we have another hot tip for Exchange administrators. The public preview of Exchange Titanium server (beta 2) was released last week. It's very stable and gives administrators and others a chance to check out Titanium's new features. You can download a copy or order a beta kit, which includes a copy of Windows Server 2003 (formerly known as .NET server) and Office 11 beta 1. A shipping and handling charge may apply for the beta kit, but it's a good investment, since you get the Office 11 beta as well. For more information, see http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/ti/beta.asp.

Titanium has a lot of new features, including a new connection service for Outlook 11 clients called "RPC over HTTP". By allowing Outlook 11 users to connect to Exchange in it's native mode, using just port 80, network security is improved since the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) ports can remain closed on the firewall. This cool new feature will turn out to be cold for many Exchange sites as there are too many requirements that will prevent many sites from realizing the full potential of this. Not only do you need to use Outlook 11 on Windows XP SP1, you need Titanium installed on Windows Server 2003, for both the front end and back end servers, and the DC and GC need to be running on Windows Server 2003. Any public folders accessible to the Outlook client need to be homed on a Titanium server, you guessed it, running on Windows Server 2003. The reason for the Windows Server 2003 requirement relates to features available in IIS6 that are not in IIS5 and there really isn't a way to avoid it, but it's going to prevent a lot of sites from taking advantage of this feature.

There is a lot more to Titanium than just RPC over HTTP and many of the other new or improved features will still make upgrading worthwhile. If your site uses OWA (Outlook Web Access), you'll like spell check (when you press F7), the ability to setup rules when using OWA, and the option to block external content (Web bugs).

Another recent announcement out of Redmond that may interest network administrators includes a recently released ISA feature pack. This feature adds improved SMTP filtering capability, increased OWA security and new publishing wizards. One of my favorite new features is link translation. When enabled, this forwards internal web addresses (http://myserver/) to the correct server, eliminating broken links and errors when visitors access your site from the internet. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/isaserver/featurepack1/default.asp to learn more.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's coauthor of Word 2002: The Complete Reference (Osborne, 2001) and Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development (for Wrox Press). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.