Exchange 2010 has been announced – and should be available later this year! The first public beta has some of the feature set and shows the direction Microsoft will be taking Exchange. Three things stand out about Exchange 2010: a continued to push into further integrated communications, client management and enterprise clustering. Additionally, Exchange 2010 includes improvements to the database design, which should reduce overall disk I/O by up to 50% and allow the databases to be run on lower tier DAS storage (with a target at SATA, even in larger environments). While a move to reduce errors in the database and make it less I/O dependent is a good start for compelling features, it does not speak to active-active clustering. These new options are more similar to the LCR options introduced in 2007, just with 16 replicas now being available – which allows for a lot of disaster recovery.
Exchange 2010 includes server-side email archival, which will be a big boon to many Mac environments (Entourage still doesn’t have an auto-archive feature). Server-side email archiving also allows enterprise organizations to gain further control over archives and enforce better policy management for mailboxes.
Exchange 2010 allows users to manage many of their own common tasks rather than opening a service request. Exchange will also warn users (and allow administrators to make policies based on these types of events) before they make common mistakes such as sending mail to large distribution groups, to recipients who are out of the office or to recipients outside the organization. Overall, this move towards self-service should reduce overall support costs.
Text based voice mail preview, voice mail rules and further integrated Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Outlook Mobile dominate the theme of Exchange 2010. Users of the Microsoft unified communications environment will be able to see text previews of voice mail using Outlook, delete voice mails out of Outlook without picking up a hand set and even create rules for dealing with certain types of messages (for example if a voice mail is less than 1 second it should probably just be deleted). There are a number of other features, most of which (such as a message indicator light, caller ID and voice control over voice mail) are already present in other modern phone systems – the key word here is other as Microsoft now has what amounts to a phone system built into Exchange.
As always, many of the new features of Exchange will revolve around new features within the Office product line, which will also receive a refresh in 2010. Public folders (not shared folders) will more than likely be moved into SharePoint, which will also see an update in 2010. There will also be a number of upgraded Powershell commands that will further automate the use of Exchange with the upcoming Windows 7 operating system.
Overall, for many environments, Exchange 2010 should represent a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than previous releases. However, it will need to be strategically planned well in advance, especially if your organization will be skipping Exchange 2007 and upgrading from 2003 into Exchange 2010. If you need help with the strategy and assistance, please feel free to contact 318 and we will do whatever possible to aid in the planning of this transition.
