Today, Microsoft have publicly released details of the next generation of Exchange server - Exchange 2010, formally known to Cobweb and the TAP programme by code-name "E14"
Yesterday at Interact2009 in Reading, I heard from Rajesh Jha the Corporate Vice President for Exchange in a live keynote from Microsoft Corp in Redmond, Seattle. He was asked to describe his top 3 or 4 features in Exchange 2010, and here they are for you;
- A clear focus on the user experience and end-user productivity. $650 billion is lost in productivity due to poor/unreliable/inefficient email systems.
- With Exchange 2010, there is support for any browser and any mobile device.
- Outlook Web Access really does replicate the Outlook experience, including presence information (just like Messenger with online, offline, busy status etc.), instant messaging, and (working) built-in support for Rights Management to fully protect your company confidential emails. There are some good example screenshots here
- Mail Tips. These are information bar messages, just like the pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer, that warns you if you're about to email an internal document to internal recipients, or are going to spam a distribution list with 2000 recipients, or if the recipient has their Out of Office set.
- Ignore Conversation button (as a VP in Microsoft, this was Rajesh's favourite feature) - when you're CC'd in an email conversation that's never ending and you've done your time, just hit the Ignore button and it's consigned to Deleted Items forever more.
- Mail Archiving & discovery. Big mailboxes, retention of items including deleted mail and mailboxes, plus the tools to provide email discovery for compliance purposes. It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against the tried and tested (and trusted) third-party archival & compliance products from the likes of Autonomy ZANTAZ and Symantec EnterpriseVault
- Further performance gains. Once again, big claims of disk I/O reductions, and there's support for big capacity SATA disks which are less costly than traditional fibre-channel SAN arrays. There are availability and replication improvements that are providing ways to improve service delivery that were previously very expensive to enter into.
- Exchange 2010 will run as a Server or as a Service, i.e. on-premise or hosted.
All cool, exciting stuff. Cobweb are already running a build of Exchange 2010 internally so we will be able to go into more depth on these features and we will share our experiences to date on our Exchange blog site www.exchange2007.com
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