Sizing up Exchange 2010

Stephen Elop: Organisations must balance cost cutting with productivity innovation

Despite new communication technologies such as Twitter, Facebook and Telepresence, email remains the staple tool for business communication, and it is not an exaggeration to say that businesses everywhere remain utterly dependent on it. So all eyes were on Microsoft’s Exchange 2010 release, made at the TechEd Europe conference last week. This is the tech giant’s most significant upgrade to its email system since Exchange 2007 was released in 2006.

The conference keynote speech, delivered by Microsoft business division president Stephen Elop, was devoted to the cost and productivity benefits of Exchange 2010.

He said that organisations must strike a balance between cost cutting and productivity innovation, and that this is one of the most challenging tasks for businesses in the current economic climate.

He said that Enterprise 2010 users will be better able to strike that balance as a result of Exchange 2010 being able to use cheap storage as it allows customers to take low-cost disk drives and plug them directly into the Exchange server.

One user of Exchange 2010, NEC Philips UK operations director Steve Derbyshire, said of the product: “We have increased our storage eightfold at a quarter of the cost of traditional storage.”

However, there are some downsides to the release and one of these is the upgrade path. Clive Longbottom, services director for business processes facilitation at IT analyst Quocirca, explained that firms that had not deployed Exchange 2007, but jumped to the Exchange 2010 from a previous version, might face difficulties.

Exchange 2010 has to run on Windows Server 2008 or the R2 version of that operating system, so firms using Exchange 2003 will have to move to a new server operating system that needs 64-bit hardware.

Ian Hameroff, Microsoft technical product manager for the Exchange product management group, explained that migrations for larger customers normally involve new hardware, so this upgrade will be expected.

However, not every implementation will require a full set-up. “In Exchange 2007 we introduced ‘server roles’, making it easier for customers to stage deployments,” he said.

Chris Ingle, IDC European systems group consulting and research director, said: “Firms will find it hard to migrate from a competitive platform such as Lotus Notes because the underlying architecture is so different. However, for customers already on Exchange the path will be simpler and the new version has many productivity features that will appeal to users.”

New features include support for Firefox, the ability to ignore unimportant threaded conversations with a single click, and a facility that allows companies to set policies that stop emails being sent outside firms’ firewalls.

Microsoft’s Elop also argued that Exchange 2010 can deliver cost savings when an enterprise uses it as a single site for all forms of communication, including voicemail.

However, Quocirca’s Longbottom added that this would not be a big enough incentive for firms to upgrade: “It’s a ‘nice to have’, but it’s certainly not a necessary feature.”

Microsoft also announced its Forefront Protection 2010 package at TechEd, a product designed to give security to the new version of Exchange.