Alexander’s Blog

Microsoft has announced that Exchange Server 2007 has been released to manufacturing. Microsoft is running more than 120,000 mailboxes in production on Exchange 2007 and have exceeded their SLA of 99.95% availability. In addition, more than 200 Technology Adoption Partners (TAP) and Rapid Deployment Partners (RDP) have over 55,000 mailboxes in production operating within their enterprise SLAs.

Microsoft recently announced the release of Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products, including Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, Antigen Spam Manager and Antigen Enterprise Manager. These products will be available to customers on July 1, 2006.

Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products use multiple scan engines to help provide comprehensive protection from viruses, spam and other security threats. In addition to scan engines from industry-leading security companies AhnLab Inc., Authentium Inc., CA Inc., Kaspersky Lab, MailFilters.com Inc., Norman Data Defense Systems Inc., Sophos Plc and VirusBuster Ltd., all Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products now include the new Microsoft anti-virus engine.

Here’s a list of products that will be available.

1. Antigen for Exchange provides anti-virus and content filtering for Exchange Server 2003 and 2000, stopping threats that get past perimeter defenses while simultaneously containing internal incidents.

2. Antigen for SMTP Gateways provides anti-virus and content filtering for Windows Server™ 2003 and Windows Server 2000 Server SMTP Gateways, stopping threats before they reach internal messaging resources and users.

3. Antigen Spam Manager provides anti-spam and content filtering for Windows®-based SMTP and Exchange servers, stopping spam before it can affect user and network productivity.

4. Antigen Enterprise Manager provides centralized management for Antigen-protected servers, improving IT administrators’ visibility into and control of e-mail server security.

5. Antigen Messaging Security Suite provides comprehensive anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering for Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server e-mail servers and SMTP gateways (includes Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways and Antigen Spam Manager).

6. Antigen Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. Provides critical events and alerts on virus, worm and spam activity to Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 from Antigen for Exchange Server 2003, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, and Antigen Spam Manager, and monitors the health and availability of these products.

Click here for more details.

By default Outlook blocks several types of attachments for security reasons. There are two levels of attachment security in Microsoft Outlook 2003. Access to Level 1 files is blocked and you can’t changed that. When you receive an attachment with a Level 2 file type, you will be prompted to save the file to your hard disk. There are no Level 2 files by default but you can add or remove Level 2 type files if you are an administrator. There are dozens of Level 1 type files. For a list of Level 1 file types that are blocked by Outlook, click here.

If you wish to allow certain types of attachments in Outlook 2003, e.g. URLs, you can modify the registry as described below.

1. Clik, Start, Run, and type regedit.exe to start the registry editor.
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Your Version Number\Outlook\Security. The version number will be something like 10.0 or 11.0, depending on your version.
3. Click Edit, New, String Value.
4. For Value name type Level1Remove and press Enter.
5. Double-click the new entry and set the Value data to a list of extensions seperated by semicolon that you want to allow. For example, if you want to allow URLs, EXE and VBS files, enter url;exe;vbs in lowercase. Do not enter a period before file types.
5. Restart Outlook for the changes to take effect.

To provide enhanced security, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 is designed to prevent you from unblocking attachments.

Because Outlook is so widely used, it has been the target of several virus attacks in the past that have affected millions of people. Microsoft has acted to protect people from files, such as .exe and .bat files, that are often used to run malicious scripts when opened. Unfortunately this makes file sharing less convenient for many people, but security must take precedence.

Microsoft Office 2003 file types most commonly shared between people, such as .doc, .xls, and .ppt files, are not blocked.

If you need to share files that have file types blocked by this feature, you have several options, including the following:

If you don’t see the Security tab on your Exchange organization’s Properties tab, obviously you won’t be able to modify the security.

Here’s how you can enable the Security tab by modifying the registry.

1. Start the registry editor (regedit.exe).
2. Locate the following subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\EXAdmin.
3. From the Edit menu, select New, and then select DWORD value.
4. Type ShowSecurityPage and press Enter.
5. Double-click the entry you just created and set the value to 1.

Close the registry editor. You should now have the Security tab in the Properties of your Exchange organization.