Exchange 2010 Course Reactions - Day 3 of 5

Day three of learning about Exchange 2010, from a Notes & older Exchange viewpoint.

Routing
The mail routing is fairly simple, which is good. An improvement over some (very old) previous versions...

Message tracking logs
Wait... Useful logs from Microsoft?
I was stunned.
Useful logs that are in a usable text format, rather than some odd binary format?
PRAISE THE DARK GODS! FOR THEY ARE SURELY REWARDING US!

(Seriously, this was a very welcome surprise. My town is going to be suspiciously empty of chickens as an act of thanks.)

Relay controls
Clear and simple. With simple being the operative word, unfortunately. You can't restrict by sender unless the sender authenticates - great for controlling users, not so good for controlling applications.

Message delivery tracking
Is on by default, and users can track their own status.
That'll save us some time - just write up some instructions, and tell the helpdesk to send them to anyone whose "important email hasn't arrived".

Edge Servers
Antivirus and antispam. A mixed bag, as it's both extremely capable and a little rough around the edges. (No pun intended.)
I'm still uncertain about Edge servers. I suppose I'm just not the target market - they're probably superb in SMEs, but seem a bit useless to me.

Encryption
Mutual TLS is nice.
But overall, let's be honest - Notes has better security options here. S/MIME certificates aren't stored in the directory, but as files. Technically, Notes is the same - except you have no access if you don't have that file. Which focuses minds and ensures they don't get lost.
By comparison, I can't see how the Exchange/Outlook implementation of S/MIME can actually be a workable solution.

A general observation
The interface is slick. As well as always showing you the Powershell commands it used to accomplish something, it's just nicely laid out.
Well, maybe not nicely laid out - but it's pretty flat. I remember trying to amend the DNS settings on Exchange Server 2000. Properties of something, third tab out of nine, click on a button, go to the second tab out of seven, click on a button, go to the other tab of the two, click another button... It was an awful Byzantine nest of properties boxes and buttons, and I hated it.
With 2010, there's none of that. Everything is usually in one properties dialogue, with buttons being a rare exception in there.
This is a good thing.