Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 - Comprehensive Feature list

Just when the speculations about Office 14 was starting to hum in, Microsoft puts forward a decisive disclosure that it will not come before 2010 but there will be a public beta version available for the new and refined exchange server program. The public beta test version of Exchange Server 2010, as the product is called, is the first of a wave of upgrades to Microsoft programs as they prepare their next big release of the entire office suite. Exchange Server can work entirely as an online service, which may attract customers looking to save money on hardware and support for their e-mail and messaging systems. It has enhanced information leakage protection, transcribe voice message et al. So let’s look at its features and what more does it have to offer.

Enhanced Interoperability

As Cnet quotes Sanjay Jha, the lead of Exchange Server operations within Microsoft,

…the technology preview will include both the traditional desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote as well as the browser-based “Office Web Apps” that Microsoft is building. The browser-based versions will be somewhat more limited than their desktop counterparts, but will include basic editing abilities, Microsoft has said. The software maker has also said the browser-based applications will run in Safari and Firefox, in addition to Internet Explorer, which will take Office onto both Linux computers and the iPhone.

interoperability, here comes Microsoft. But talking bout interoperability, its not something new in Microsoft, If you remember well, they foresaw the technological demands of ’settling for less materials and more productivity’ and the need to be platform independent (or come outta Micorosoft framework) quite early with eclipse4SL

Features

1. OWA (Outlook Web Access) support for Multiple Browsers

I know the title is self explaining. But, to tell you the truth, a person with Mac or Linux very reluctantly switched from Firefox or Safari to Internet Explorer just because they had to run IE in a Windows VM and that too which had no multiple tabs then. With this web access for different browsers, Microsoft made up a lot for the acceptability.

2. Improved Storage Reliability

You can now run Exchange reliably without dealing with Windows clustering, RAID arrays, or fancy Enterprise-class disk. It will be cheap to save or restore/ recover data and quick too.

3. Mail Tips

I still smell something like the one Google did with Gmail last month, Undo button. But its just my bad nose. Mail Tips is a program which tells you about the possible mistakes you are going to do by sending a mail to someone whom you don’t intend to. After all, you won’t like to send a personal mail to your secretary or boss anyway. Mail Tips helps you in that case, by warning you from before and giving you tips. Cool one.

4. Conversation View

Talking about the latest development project online and want all of them to get connected at once? It sure is a painful job to devote one window a person. But now you can have threaded conversation under a single node. How is it a big deal? We are using such things for the last 20 Years! Okay It is new to Outlook and OWA, and we should be happy.

5. Sharing

This is another of a kind which lets you share a lot of things effectively. Exchange server program has two main properties to share.

• Calendar Sharing: You can share calendars to federated users by OWA.
• Contact Sharing:  You can share contacts very easily now.

6. Voice Mail Preview

This is quite a nice feature. You will now have a text preview of your voice mail messages! I am not quite sure how perfectly is it gonna work, but the very concept is lucrative enough to give it a shot.

7. Exchange Control Panel (ECP)

Exchange control panel is another new addition to this. Now you get self serviced tasks which uselessly needed administrators to prompt before. Another brownie point to Microsoft for optimizing.

8. Critical Security

Microsoft has gone over the typical or traditional security benchmarks and have fancied some really cool features in Exchange server programs. If you lead the organization, you will be happy to know that Microsoft has introduced features like,

1. Mobile Device Block/Allow List: That allows/ blocks specific devices only, helping you to have a secure way of hardware monitoring.
2. Protected voice mail: You can now actually protect voice mail and track them and restrict them not to go outside the organization anyhow.
3. Outlook protection rules: Automatically triggers Outlook to apply an RMS template to a message before it is sent.

9. Distribution Group Management

Now users can create, modify and access different distribution groups according as their choices and likings. That will help a better precision in teaming with the right kind of people under a single roof which will automatically increase effectiveness than reaching out to specific people individually.

10. Others

And there are few more noteworthy features which I want to sum up in one line. You get SATA support now involving I/O optimization, JDBO support, incoming voice mail reception, multi-mailbox search — all of them will prove to be helpful in someway or the other

Conclusion

Its just a public beta version only. We haven’t seen the final specimen just like Windows 7. But the new Exchange server, just like the exciting new OS of Microsoft, sounds and shows promise. I don’t know about pricing but I guess it will be on the higher side. Considering Microsoft perfects any and every feature they have talked of, Exchange Server may well be one of the most popular products of Microsoft.

[Source: infoworld.com, cnet.com, reuters.com]