Hosted Exchange is getting updated

As part of our commitment to offer the best solution to our customers, we are over the next few weeks, planning to migrate all of our Hosted Exchange customers to Exchange 2010.

Exchange 2010 offers the end user far more features over Exchange 2007, such as the premium version of OWA (Outlook Web App) being available to more browsers, such as Firefox, and Google Chrome.

Unfortunately, there will be some changes some of your end-user may have to make.

1. Yesterday we whitelabelled our AutoDiscover service, which meant that end users on our Standard plans may have received a pop-up informing them that Outlook was trying to reconfigure their email settings. This is normal practice and can be allowed. We have a blog post on our status blog here
2. Users who use Microsoft Entourage as their Mac mail client will have to apply a mandatory update, if they haven’t already. This update is Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition, and is available from this page – the actual download link is in the bottom right hand portion of the page. If you do not apply this update, your email client will not be able to connect to Exchange 2010.
3. Customers are reminded that if their DNS hosting is not using ns1.blacknight.com and ns2.blacknight.com then they must manually configure an autodiscover subdomain as follows: if your Hosted Exchange domain is domain.tld, then you must create a subdomain of domain.tld called autodiscover.domain.tld which must be created as a CNAME to autodiscover.blacknight.com – a seperate email will be sent to customers who this effects.

We will also be offering Outlook 2010 for Windows and Outlook 2011 for Mac available for download through your Control Panel after we migrate customers to Exchange 2010.