Beta 2 of DPM 2007 should be available from May 31st. DPM 2007 supports more Microsoft applications than before including Exchange 2003/2007, SharePoint, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and SQL Server. Of course, as before, DPM can also protect file servers.

What's new in beta 2?

• Longhorn file erver support (Windows Server 2008)
• Protection for Active Directory and System State
• Protection for SharePoint 2003/2007: with options for site and site collection recovery from the full backup
• Protection for Windows XP/Vista desktops
• Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1: consistent inside and outside the VHD with Windows Server 2003 SP1 guests and new virtual machine additions
• Agent installation using SMS, Group Policy, WSUS or pre-installed in the operating system
• Media encryption
• PowerShell support

The Virtual Server 2005 R2 support is interesting because you can make a consistent backup of a virtual machine of both the virtual machine's disks and the data inside the virtual machine. The NTFS filesystem inside the virtual machine will be consistent, SQL Server databases, Exchange databases etc...

For more information about the upcoming beta 2, you should check out this webcast.

This document contains a great overview of new features in Longhorn compared to Windows Server 2003 SP1. By reading it, you will probably find some stuff you did not know yet. For example, I did not know about the AD DS snapshot viewer, a mechanism to take snapshots of the Active Directory database that you can view with ldp.

Check it out!

On the Ask the Performance Team blog there is a good post about point and print functionality of Windows Vista. Get the full details here.