There isn't a lot of new information to report from TechEd on the Exchange and Outlook front, however SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint integration with Outlook 2007 is a hot topic among attendees. Its going to be an excellent replacement for Exchange public folders. Groove was a very popular topic as well.

Yes, migrating Exchange public folder applications to SharePoint won't be a pleasant experience for many sites, but SharePoint server's workflow, 2-way sync with Outlook, and email enabled lists make it a viable alternative to public folders. For sites using other email servers, SharePoint 2007 offers many of the benefits of Exchange server.

As usual for TechEd, many of the questions were about Outlook, deployment, and Outlook deployment. The following are a small sampling of the most common questions asked.

Q. How do you convert Outlook ANSI PST to Unicode PST?
A. Unfortunately, the only method is using Import/Export commands in Outlook. There is a 3rd party tool that may speed things up.
UpStart
http://www.maclean.com/upstart/ 

Q. How do you deploy Outlook 2007 Junk email lists to all users?
A. Use the OCT (Office Customization Tool). It's included on the volume licensing media.
Create and deploy Junk E-mail Filter lists in Outlook 2007
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/6ded8299-04c8-4c35-90b6-f997c60d82d71033.mspx 

Q. Which party are you going to tonight?
A. TechEd attendees are serious about learning about technology and expanding their skills, they don’t go to parties. Even when we go to parties, it's all business. The Exchange administrators chatting with the Cat in the Hat were discussing Exchange security best practices, necessary because Red Fish and Blue Fish set off a virus when they opened a message that looked like it was from Ned, about his bed. They were not partying.

Q. What's new in Office 2007 SP1 and when will it be released? Will the Print command be on the Quick Access Toolbar by default (in all Office applications) in SP1?
A. Microsoft won't say if there will be anything new, when to expect it, or if they will be adding the Print command to the QAT. However, you can expect bug fixes and should see it sometime around the end of the year.

It's amazing how often a seemingly innocent action by the user and an update for a program can affect negatively another. In this case, it's MS07-027: Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer, released in mid-May. After installing that update, Outlook 2003 responds very slowly when typing HTML messages.

The problem in this case is two-fold. First, users either added a large number of sites to IE's restricted zone or installed a "security" application (of the spy bot type) that added them. The cumulative security update then changed the way the Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine interacts with the Restricted Sites zone and this change causes Outlook to pause after each keystroke while the IE7 rendering engine checked the sites in the zone.

The user has several options to fix this issue:
1. Remove the security update.
2. Switch to plain text formatted messages. Using RTF message format will fix the problem but should only be used when all of your recipients use Outlook.
3. Remove all of the unnecessary sites from the Restricted zone.
4. Use Word as the email editor.

Of these options, removing the security update should be the last resort. Editing out the chaff in the Restricted zone would be my first choice since too many users load it with sites they are unlikely to ever come across and which may no longer be "live". I'm a big fan of short blocked or restricted lists and long safe lists, so I would tighten the Internet zone and use the Trusted zone for the sites I visited often.

The advantages of using short restricted lists and longer safe lists is that too often the restricted address is only in use for a limited time before the webhost shuts it down. In the case of email addresses, so many spammers fake the sending address or only use them once. In either case, the software reads the list as needed, which slows down the response for the very few times it hits a valid entry. Safe lists, while long, are still much shorter than blocking every untrusted address in existence.

Outlook 2007 uses Word's HTML rendering engine and is not affected by this specific problem.

MS07-027: Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=931768 

A user asks: Although search folders in outlook 2003 are virtual folders don't they still take up space and count as part of the overall inbox folder size? We have a 80mb quota on inbox size for users so can't these search folders become quite large and take up some space?

No, a Search folder should not appreciably affect available mailbox space; in most cases, it uses less storage space than a message. As you noted, they are virtual folders and as such, don't keep a copy of the message in the folder, just a pointer to the message in the Inbox or other folder. After 7 days of non-use, the index and pointers are gone until you use that folder again.

A user asks: I'm using Outlook 2003. RPC over HTTP worked fine until the admin needed to install a new SSL certificate, now it returns a connection error.

This may happen because your Outlook doesn't trust the certificate and can't offer you a dialog accepting the certificate. To fix it you'll need to install a copy of the certificate on your computer so Outlook knows to trust it. The administrator should provide you with a copy, but if he doesn't you can usually get one from your OWA site, provided it uses the same certificate.