It’s almost here: The Exchange Team announced Exchange Server 2010 SP1! A beta of SP1 is planned for June 2010. Here are some of the most interesting announced features and improvements:

• Ability to host the personal archive on another mailbox database than the database where the mailbox itself resides;
• Import e-mail from PST directly in Exchange 2010;
• Delegation on personal archives;
• Messaging Records Management UI;
• Multi-Mailbox Search preview and deduplication;
• Multi-Mailbox Search annotation of reviewed items;
• Personal archive support for Outlook 2007;
• OWA: pre-fetch
• OWA: asynchronous operation of delete, mark-as-read and categorization;
• OWA: Lengthy operations will not block OWA;
• OWA: Web-Ready viewing of IRM items in Safari/Mac, FireFox and IE on Windows;
• OWA: Themes
• OWA: Configurable reading pane position;
• Anonymous calendar sharing via web;
• Mobility: Tether-free IRM support in EAS;
• Mobility: Send-As support;
  
• Mobility: Block/Quarantine notification;
• Mobility: Conversation view (fully).

The Management UI has received quite a few enhancements for the EMC and ECP:

• Create/configure Retention Tags + Retention Policies in EMC;
• Configure Transport Rules in ECP;
• Configure Journal Rules in ECP;
• Configure MailTips in ECP;
• Provision and configure the Personal Archive in ECP;
• Configure Litigation Hold in ECP & EMC;
• Configure Allow/Block/Quarantine mobile device policies in ECP;
• RBAC role management in ECP;
• Configure Database Availability Group (DAG) IP Addresses and Alternate Witness Server in EMC;
• Recursive public folder settings management (including permissions) in EMC.

For more info and video, head over to Yes Virginia, There’s An Exchange 2010 SP 1 on the Exchange team blog.