Well it’s official as of today: The next version of Exchange will be called Exchange 2010! Today is the 1st day that those of us who have been in the know (Microsoft employees, Microsoft MVPs, and Microsoft TAP/RDP members) can start talking publicly about E14/Exchange 2010. It’s been VERY hard not to talk about all of the GREAT new features coming out, especially to those organizations who have just started migrating or planning to migrate to Exchange 2007.
Today Microsoft released the first public beta of Exchange 2010 (download here) and information on it. See my next blog post on “What’s New and Cool in Exchange 2010” for more details but here’s my top 10 new features\changes in E14/2010 that should make you start researching and reevaluating how you know about some core parts of Exchange:
1) Reduced cost: Storage & Data Managment
2) Reduced cost: Productivity Loss
3) Reduced cost: Administration
4) Database Availability Groups (DAGs)!
5) Storage requirements (see #1-2)
6) Support for huge mailboxes and SGs (See #1-5)
7) Fully OWA functionality on IE, Firefox, and Safari (post from Paul Robichaux on this topic)
8) Better management
9) Easy co-existence between on-site and hosted mailboxes
10) Simple cross org calendar sharing
I know it might seem silly to list “Reduced cost” three times but it’s that big of a change in Exchange 2010. Microsoft estimates that 80% of the (capital expense) cost of Exchange is storage and trust me they have eliminated most of this cost. Here’s the best way I can sum it up: A single 2TB database on a single 2TB 7.2K SATA drive (no RAID) is just fine! (with three DB replicas in the DAG).
So what’s the ETA for Exchange 2010? Well I can’t say for sure but per this post it should be out this YEAR!
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