Last week the next version of Exchange broke cover with a blog entry over on the Exchange team blog and video on Technet Edge. The video has been posted quite a lot over the last few days, but it’s pretty interesting so I thought it was worth speaking about.
Exchange 14 is shaping up to be a huge change from the application we know and (most of the time) love. Architecturally the biggest difference is that 14 is designed to run in the Cloud on MS’s Software + Services platform. Of course you’ll still be able to buy it and run it locally, but the option is there to take the infrastructure components out of your buildings. What’s more you’ll be able to run both scenarios and split your users between them.
This could be a huge advantage for some companies. For example if you’re running a global company but with segregated IT organisations each region would be able to deliver mail services in the way that best suit that region.
There are a heap of other changes in functionality too, both from the techie side and the end user experience. From what I understand there are things like live mail box moves and federation between Exchange organisations for shared free/busy info.
From a user perspective webmail is much improved (again!) and includes things like Presence, and Out-of-office notifications are see proactively before an email is sent. There’s also some interesting stuff around translation between languages.