If you have been following this blog, you may be interested to know that we just launched a newsletter called “onMessaging” that is focused on all things messaging. We’re planning to publish a new issue about once per quarter.

Similar to this blog, the newsletter is covering various topics about corporate messaging infrastructures while also providing specific insights and advice on how to handle some of the challenges in managing today’s mission-critical email, IM and collaboration systems.

For subscribers, we will also include in every newsletter a different, free product or service offering to help cope with tough economic times.

You can sign-up for the newsletter here.

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Today is Earth Day and incidentally it feels as if spring is finally coming to New England. What a perfect morning.

Apropos green initiatives: Michael Osterman wrote a blog post last week with some surprising findings. He questioned respondents in his most recent survey whether “green” computing was a criterion in their decision-making process for new messaging server purchases.

The answer was “not much impact at all”:  53% of organizations said that green computing would play little or no role in their purchase decisions; only 2% told us that it would be a critical part of the decision-making process.

That is remarkable, since many companies are investing heavily in server consolidation and virtualization, which often significantly reduces their overall power consumption. According to Osterman, servers consume about 1.2% of the total power output in the US alone.

Perhaps it proves the point that market forces are still the best drivers for environmental progress. Just as SUVs became less popular with rising fuel costs, the push for greener data centers is largely driven by the need to improve a company’s bottom line through savings on power and cooling.

Twitter has been making headlines for weeks, fueled by a celebrity powered media frenzy. With Ashton Kutcher beating CNN to 1 million Twitter followers last Friday and now even Oprah Winfrey joining in - Twitter is surely bracing for the Oprah effect.

So is Twitter over-hyped or the future of electronic communication?

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Microsoft announced yesterday the availability of the public beta for Exchange Server 2010. The software, which is only released for 64-bit Windows is available for download here. The official product release is slated for the second half of 2009.

The key areas for improvements of this release seem to focus on productivity and cost savings, by providing:

• Capabilities to mix on-premise and hosted services, while maintain the same capabilities
• Storage performance improvements and resulting cost reduction
• New compliance capabilities through built-in archiving and expanded user roles management
• Improving user productivity and inbox management/experience

I found particularly interesting the introduction of so called MailTips that help prevent end-user faux-pas, such as reply-to-all or accidentally sending mail to unintended recipients outside the company.  I’m curious to see the actual implementation, since misguided user tips can quickly get annoying - remember clippy.

Voicemail preview is also very cool - I’ve been using Phonetag as an external voice mail transcription service for over a year now and would not want to miss it.

WindowsITPro published this more detailed article highlighting other notable improvements.

I have to admit I didn’t know that until yesterday, when one of my emails got rejected.  I’m sure it is buried somewhere in the FIOS services agreement, amongst all the other small print nobody ever reads.  But it’s true - Verizon scans every outbound email, as outlined here.

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As reported on TechCrunch last week.  The management team at Nielsen Media decided to control the abuse of Reply-To-All by simply removing this functionality entirely from the Microsoft Outlook email client.  In a memo sent by Nielsen CIO, Andrew Cawood, he explains that the measure will “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”.

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