Today, Microsoft released SP2 for Exchange 2010.

You can download SP2 here.

As previously announced, the major features for this update focus on the following areas:

A “Hybrid Configuration Wizard” (HCW) – which is used to guide administrators through the Office 365 Rich Coexistence setup. BTW, you’ll notice Microsoft actually no longer uses the phrase “Rich Coexistence”, but instead prefers “hybrid” configuration.

Address Book Policies (ABP) – which allow an Exchange organization to segment the address list so that separate user populations can be hidden from each other (such as in a multi-tenant environment). Here is an article that describes how this works, as well as another discussing some of the limitations.

Cross-Site Silent Redirection for OWA – which allows more seamless OWA redirection in a multi-site topology.

OWA Mini – which provides a text-only OWA experience so that you can use OWA from phones that do not support ActiveSync.

Here are some other fun facts:

Exchange 2010 SP2 extends the schema. One interesting change is the new msExchExtensionAttribute attributes. We’ve had 15 custom attributes for a while now, but this adds 30 more, all of which are multi-valued. For your reference, Microsoft tracks Exchange schema extensions on this page.

Administrators can now disable the auto-mapping of user mailboxes in Outlook 2007/2010. This may be helpful if a user has the “Full Access” permission to many other mailboxes. By default, Outlook will try to mount all of them which could cause performance issues.

You’ll need to add the “IIS 6 WMI Compatibility” component if you are upgrading from RTM or SP1. A fresh install would offer to add this for you, but if you’re upgrading, you’ll need add it yourself. You can easily add the IIS role service with the following two PowerShell commands:

Import-Module servermanager

Add-WindowsFeature Web-WMI

On some new hardware, I clocked the upgrade at ~22 minutes. Ironically, Exchange Update Rollups often take longer than this!

There are many new Wiki pages discussing the features of SP2. Use these until formal TechNet documentation is available. UPDATE : TechNet documentation is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529924.aspx

