We made very good progress in the past few weeks: the new ORF Transport Agents are nearly complete, the new installer is going to be finished in a few days and the help system has been updated. The first 4.1 test versions will be ready this month and get published in January.

Also, two out of the three major questions that slowed us down has been answered reliably.

The first question was actually a software issue: the ORF Service relies on a Windows component called CDOSYS, which is broken under Exchange 2007 for 32-bit processes like the ORF Service (64-bit works fine, though). We were not sure whether this component was deliberately broken, but apparently that is not the case (thanks Matt!). Fixing the broken CDOSYS registration is easy and the ORF installer will do it under Exchange 2007. (If you wonder why we don’t just compile the ORF Service to 64-bit, the answer is that Borland Delphi has no 64-bit compiler support and according to the current roadmap, the earliest date for that feature is Winter 2008).

The second question, answered by our ISV Buddy yesterday (thanks Arun!) was regarding outbound email detection. In a previous article, I mentioned that we can no longer hook outbound SMTP command events under Exchange 2007, so we had to move the detection into a routing event, which assumes we can make difference between recipients inside and outside the organization. It is not an entirely obvious question, but now we have the answer, thanks to our buddy.

We are hoping an answer for our third question (regarding email forking) soon and that any compatibility issues we may have with Exchange 2007 SP1 will be sorted out quickly. Stay tuned, version 4.1 is coming.