It is now official: ORF 5 will support the IIS6 SMTP Service of Windows Server 2008 R2. We just have finished testing an early build of ORF 5 on the above platform and everything seems to work great. We will also revisit the question of the now-unsupported Windows Server 2008 IIS6 SMTP Service – that platform was broken multiple ways the last time we checked, but that was a long ago and service packs may have fixed the problems.

We just have released a compatibility update for ORF 4.3 that enables using ORF with the Exchange 2010 Release Candidate. The update is available for testing purposes at:

http://vamsoft.com/r?mex14-rc-update (10kB ZIP download)

Installation instructions for the update are available in the ZIP file (readme.txt).

Without this update, you may experience the following problems:

• An error is displayed when querying the ORF Transport Agent status: ‘ERROR: Could not get the status of the “Vamsoft ORF SMTP Receive Agent” transport agent. Unexpected transport agent member type Microsoft.Exchange.Management.AgentTasks. TransportAgentObjectId for property Identity. Type expected: System.String.’,
• ORF cannot be uninstalled.

Installing the update fixes the above issues with Exchange 2010 RC. Please report any problems that you may experience to our technical support. Thank you.

We have received a few issue reports regarding Exchange 2007 SP2 installation breaking ORF to the point that only reinstallation helps – actually, you can fix the problem without reinstalling. If you are wondering what is happening, it is the good old CDOSYS vs. Exchange 2007 issue, where the Exchange 2007 installer corrupts the registration of 32-bit CDOSYS, resulting in ORF errors logged like “On Arrival error: Unexpected exception EEngineError “Error EOleSysError updating the MIME information: Library not registered””. The installer of ORF fixes the corrupted registration, but if you perform an in-place upgrade, the ORF installer will not run and thus you need to fix the problem manually. If you get the above error, check this FAQ article.

The latest from the named properties saga (see #1, #2): a new Get-NamedProperty PowerShell cmdlet (available from Exchange 2007 SP2) that helps learning when you are about to end up on the Fail Blog.

Earlier today we went live with a new payment processor called FastSpring, which replaces share-it! as our e-commerce partner. We made this change to make your life easier, by offering a more integrated checkout experience (you will barely notice you left our website when making a payment) and a faster & better customer service in case it’s needed.

FastSpring is a California, US-based company and it’s among the few independent players in secure online payment processing, with distinguished focus on customer service. FastSpring offers practically the same range of payment options as share-it! does, with the exception of wire/bank transfers that will remain at share-it! temporarily. Support for accepting purchase order was recently introduced to FastSpring, we hope to make transition to their service soon.

You can check out the new shopping interface on the Pricing & Order page. If you have any questions, we are here to help.