“Exchange 2010 is Code Complete and on its way to General Availability”.

The next version of MS-Exchange is expected to be released at the Tech-Ed Europe event on November 9.

David Sengupta sums it up on the Ferris Blog:

Exchange 2010 takes on several existing markets. Email archiving vendors will feel the impact of native archiving capabilities. SAN vendors will feel the hit from native support for low-cost storage. And geoclustering vendors will be impacted by mailbox replication technologies now in the box.

The most significant change is that Exchange 2010 facilitates cloud services. Web-based self service capabilities, high availability, and deeper web services support all enable Exchange in the cloud.

The big question is whether Exchange 2010 will see a spike in adoption. Exchange 2007 deployments have been less than stellar.

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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.

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While there are many theories about the missing emails, reaching from government conspiracy to sheer incompetence, I would side with the latter.

I have witnessed the decision by some companies to switch their enterprise messaging vendors over recent years. Often these decisions were driven from the top down based on personal preference, false promises of massive cost savings by the new vendor and utter ignorance of existing infrastructure dependencies. I’m not sure what the driving force was behind the decision to move from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange at the White House, but the mistakes made follow the same pattern as seen in numerous other corporate cases. If your company considers the move from Notes to Exchange, review these key points in your planning and assessment to avoid making the same mistakes:

• Make sure that any existing 3rd party applications (anti-spam, anti-virus, archiving, records management, system monitoring, etc.) will still work with the new platform. Don’t forget to include any 3rd party upgrade costs in the overall migration budget.
• Include audit and retrieval costs in your evaluation. Moving to a client-based storage model (e.g. pst files) may seem like a great idea for reducing server load and storage cost, but will inherently make auditing and retrieval at a later time almost impossible. Retrieving data from remote and portable media is extremely difficult and costly, but apparently that will not be a valid legal excuse.
• Assess the skill set of your existing IT staff. Large messaging systems are complicated and require highly skilled IT workers to manage and administer. Switching platforms may require a significant retraining of existing staff, or worse, cause the defection of key resources.
• Evaluate other dependencies. Lotus Notes is much more than email, a fact that is frequently overlooked by people unfamiliar with the platform. Companies that have been running Lotus Notes for years have often custom-built rich enterprise Notes applications running mission-critical corporate functions. These dependencies are often downplayed or simply overlooked. Migrating these applications can be expensive or simply impossible, which has forced some companies to continue running both Outlook and Notes on the desktops after the migration.

Technorati Tags: lotus notes migration, missing white house emails, John Facciola

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“Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations. And worse yet, they will all tell you they are paying top dollar for the privilege because the expertise needed to successfully run a Microsoft Exchange server is some of the most expensive in the IT labor pool.”

While I don’t think that many of the issues that companies encounter within their messaging infrastructure are limited to Exchange, its tight integration and dependency on Windows and Active Directory as well as the limited choice of hardware platforms, sure seem to compound the problems. Now just imagine the arrival of unified communication.

As Michael points out:

“E-mail is considered the most mission-critical, a simple fact that is only going to become more evident once more organizations begin using Exchange as the underpinning of a unified communications architecture that is going to tie voice and video to the Exchange server. And if you think people get upset when they can’t access their e-mail, imagine what will happen when they can’t make a call because the Exchange server is down.”

For solution providers this offers great opportunity to provide supporting technology that lessens that pain. For companies considering Exchange this article gives some interesting insight worth sharing with an “Outlook-happy” executive who wants to replace an existing system that is functioning properly, with Exchange.

Technorati Tags: Exchange management, unified communication, Microsoft Exchange

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For many companies currently supporting corporate mobile email through services such as RIM’s Blackberry BES, Microsoft Mobile ActiveSync or Good Technology from Motorola a far different question arises: How will they support the iPhone on their existing infrastructure and what possible security risks does the device pose in the corporate context?

The Wall Street Journal published an article last week titled: “Companies Hang Up on Apple’s iPhone”, which discussed the issue.

“Mr. Caraher, technology director of von Briesen & Roper, a Milwaukee law firm, says he is being besieged by inquiries from employees wondering whether the office’s email system can be used with the device.

His answer, at least initially, has been no. The main problem is that the iPhone can’t send and receive email through the company’s corporate BlackBerry email servers. He says he is unwilling to look into workarounds, because they might compromise the company’s security.”

Like it or not, company executives and hipster summer interns alike will show-up next Monday touting their shiny new iPhone’s and they will find a way to get them connected to the company networks and email. Email forwarding to personal accounts on AOL, Gmail, Yahoo! and the likes will probably be a common workaround for receiving corporate mail at least initially.

While many companies are taking the wait-and-see approach, some are smarter about it and pro-actively address the issue.

“Bear Stearns Cos. last week sent its global staff of 15,000 an email saying that the iPhone won’t work with the company’s email service.”

I think companies are well advised to go one step further and clearly articulate a policy around iPhone usage. This could range from outright prohibiting its use to providing acceptable usage guidelines and workarounds in lieu of a fully integrated solution.

However, there is some good news. Smaller software vendors are seizing the opportunity. Visto, a Redwood City, CA provider of mobile business solutions just announced Secure Corporate Email for Apple iPhone, supporting both MS-Exchange and Lotus Notes. I’m sure the larger platform vendors will follow suit very quickly.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Apple, RIM, Blackberry, Good Technology, Microsoft Mobile, Exchange, Lotus Notes

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U.S. Cellular CEO Jay Ellison is banning email on Fridays. Ironically, Ellison announced the measure in an email to all 5,500 employees:

“Get out to meet your teams face-to-face. Pick up the phone and give someone a call. … I look forward to not hearing from any of you, but stop by as often as you like.”

Is a ban on email one day a week going to fix the problem? Probably not for very long, but it does send a strong signal to employees to change their communication habits. To affect long term change, companies must see beyond a short-term fix and look first at the root cause of the problem:

Why is corporate email traffic getting out of hand?

1. Is this a systemic problem of corporate culture?
2. Is email being used as intended, or filling in for broken document management and/or transaction systems?
3. Are complimentary technologies such as IM, wiki’s and intranet portals in place and being used?
4. Who are the top (ab)users of the mail system and what are these users doing?

Once the extent and cause of the problem is understood, better long term solutions can be implemented. These typically consist of both employee education and technology improvements. User training, not only on proper email use, but also on other available technologies, is critical. In many cases the users may not even know about the tools available to them, such as corporate IM (e.g. Sametime, LCS) and intranet documents sharing systems (e.g. Sharepoint, QuickPlace). Instead they default to the “comforts” of their inbox.

Btw, other companies have tried this before. I wonder if Veritas (now part of Symantec) is still observing email free Fridays?

Technorati Tags: no email fridays, jay ellison, email abuse, email overload

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Technorati Tags: scalix, ed brill, glenn winokur, lotus notes, ms exchange, open source, enterprise email

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