First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a first look at Microsoft's Exchange Server 2010 Beta, noting several usability, reliability, and compliance improvements over Exchange 2007. Top among Exchange 2010's new features are OWA support for Firefox 3 and Safari 3; improved storage reliability; conversation views; mail federation between trusted companies; and MailTips, a sort of Google Mail Goggles for the corporate environment. 'Database availability groups give you redundant mail stores with continuous replication; database-level failover gives you automatic recovery. I/O optimizations make Exchange less "bursty" and better suited to desktop-class SATA drives; JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.' Exchange 2010 will, however, require shops to upgrade to Windows Server 2008, as support for Windows Server 2003 has been dropped. Microsoft will release technical previews of other products in the suite, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010, in the third calendar quarter."

Now Let's Talk Pricing

[eldavojohn]

I found this part of the review especially helpful:

The invoice for this baby is pretty small compared to your normal MS Exchange Server, it's only 1. But that's not in dollars, that's in first born children. So I'm going to throw out a few strategies for coping with this.

• Just squeeze one out with your wife/prostitute to get it out of the way. ProTip: don't waste money on shots or clothing, a transport blanket will do. Usually you you can convince your wife that the first one is like a test run anyway.
• Order one of those adopted kids from some other country. Throw some cheap makeup on them to match your ethnicity, pick up some false documents and practice watering up your eyes for when you have to push the kid across a long empty room to Steve Ballmer waiting with a pair of handcuffs. They'll be slightly better off indentured to Microsoft than whatever country they came from anyway.
• Shaft them and never have kids. This is probably the option that will come naturally to most software folks. Get a vasectomy, abstain, do whatever it takes. There's no clause against this in the licensing agreement I read--yet.

So, like pretending you're a college student, starving African or university staff to get cheap editions of Exchange 2007, there are ways to acquired 2010 at a relatively low cost and I hope this helps you cope with the extreme cost of owning Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for your enterprise business.

Sure the costs don't stop there, you need to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 to use it and there are a few more things you'll need to upgrade if you want to keep the same functionality you have now ... but that's just the unspoken rule.

But does it run...

[rodrigoandrade]

Oh nevermind :-)

Spam To Be Canned By 2006

[gregg]

No mention of junk mail in the article. I'm still waiting for Bill to deliver on his promise of a 'spam free world.'

Re:And all the admins ask...

[Lumpy]

Nope.

MSFT is still retarded that way.

i would KILL to be able to data-mine the email in the company with a SQL script.

"here you are sir, 23 people in the office are boinking your Executive assistant."

Re:And all the admins ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ease of use, integration, and scaling.

The funny part is, most hippies I've dealt with are hippies because all it requires is the ability to spout off at the mouth and a life long lust for lethargy. Well, I should explain: it's funny because hippies would normally take the easiest way out thus providing them with more quality time in which to express laziness, and in this case, Exchange Server is by far the easiest way out. Well, maybe I should explain further: it's funny because hippies are communists (though they often present themselves under false pretenses as soclialists) and FOSS vs. commercial is analogous to communism vs. capitalism.

So, much like I envision the Soviets' as having an inability to grasp the concepts of capitalism, I envision the same for you hippy FOSS types.

Re:striped?

[Scott Scott]

Frankly, nearly every option I have ever heard containing the phrase "with Windows Server" has been a terrible idea.

Re:And all the admins ask...

[somersault]

"here you are sir, 23 people in the office are boinking your Executive assistant."

"Don't worry - I've already told the cleaners to give special attention to your desk, chair, phone, scanner, shredder, and your little wooden dinosaur sculptures with the very long necks."

Re:striped?

[ConceptJunkie]

Am I missing something, or has Exchange started to gobble up OS functions now?

You must be new to Microsoft products.

Re:Now Let's Talk Pricing

[just_another_sean]

Great. Thanks. Now I have to RTFA to find out if your serious or not.

Why do you hate /.?

Cool feature: Phone call rules

[Com2Kid]

You can setup rules for phone calls. Freaking awesome.

if (Status == b0rking_hot_secretary)
{
    if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.wife.phonenumber)
        call.redirect("/dev/null");
    else if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.otherHotSecretary.phoneumber)
        Send3WayInvite(caller);
}

But in all seriousness, it'll be nice to have a rule that auto-directs calls to my cell when I'm out of the office.

   

Depreciation

[Petersko]

"These were depreciated in Exchange07, and I'm presuming that they're still depreciated...i>

Yeah, I hear MAPI and CDO lose 40% of their value the first time you use them. Never treat them as an investment.

Re:striped?

[ConceptJunkie]

A philosophical question, then: what's coming first - Exchange running in Emacs, or Emacs running in Exchange?

My money would be on Emacs running a virtual machine on which you could install Exchange.

Now let's talk licensing

[SL Baur]

Not only the pricing, but this part is intriguing too:

Outlook protection rules

Automatically triggers Outlook to apply an RMS template to a message before it is sent

I suppose that means that a GPL V3 notice is attached whenever it notices that a user is attempting to email source code.

Take that! you GNU/Linux weenies!