Exchanging Messages
Use of instant messaging is on the rise in the enterprise, but e-mail is still king of the messaging hill, and Microsoft Exchange is the dominant player. Exchange owns about one in three desktops and is in growth mode, according to The Radicati Group, compared with a 20 percent (and shrinking) share for Lotus Notes, its closest competitor. With the exception of Vista/Longhorn, Exchange 2007 will be the most significant enterprise-class product Microsoft will release in the coming year. That makes us all the more intrigued by how tightly Microsoft will tie UC into Exchange: It will integrate with Office Communications Server 2007 to deliver e-mail, presence, IM and Web conferencing. Support for voice processing will let Exchange offer text-to-speech and speech-recognition capabilities. Mobile users can dial in to the corporate phone system, which then hands calls over to the UC role.
We're not ready to declare this a must-have upgrade, however. Support for Exchange 2003 will continue until 2010, and Exchange 2007 is a major architectural shift. For starters, it'll be supported in 64-bit mode only, and Microsoft has defined five roles--edge, hub transport, client access, mailbox and unified messaging--all in the name of scalability and security. Although the latter four roles can run on one server, the edge server must be a separate machine, and it cannot be part of the Windows domain. Not a bad idea, but not always simple to execute.
Microsoft is also promising better antispam, antivirus and anti-spyware capabilities. Its ForeFront security suite, an add-on to Exchange 2007, scans and scrubs e-mail. Antigen, the current offering for protecting Exchange, OCS, and SharePoint, has been rebranded and moved into the ForeFront product line.
