Exchange 14 Announced

It's always hard to make generalizations about large organizations, and this is particularly true of Microsoft, where business units often make decisions that seem completely at odds with one another. However, as a whole, Microsoft has recently been much more tight-lipped than usual about forthcoming products. Take Windows 7 as an example; Microsoft did a great job of playing its cards close to the vest until the Professional Developers Conference last November. And you haven't seen much about the next version of Office, either, I bet! Microsoft is still nowhere near as secretive as Apple, but the company is definitely making strides in that direction—which is why you might be surprised to know that Microsoft is well into development of the next release of Exchange Server, code-named Exchange 14.

Anyway, Exchange 14 was announced this week by the release of a video on the Exchange team blog featuring longtime Exchange program manager KC Lemson, a familiar face in the Exchange community, and Exchange Labs program manager Jim Lucey. The video begins with an explanation of the genesis of Exchange 14: It was designed from the ground up to be equally capable of running as a hosted service or an on-premises solution on your servers. Microsoft is currently using Exchange 14 to host mailboxes for Exchange Labs, which means that there are about 3.5 million mailboxes now running Exchange 14.

Read the rest of the article here.

A little late on this one, but came across this when thinking about our plans to migrate from 2k3 to 2k7 over the summer. Looks like after we migrate to 2k7 in the summer, we'll be upgrading/migrating to E14 next year :hhhmmm

-Ken