Microsoft has announced that Exchange 2010 has been released to manufacturing with expected general availability and launch to be announced at TechEd Europe 2009 in early November. More information on Microsoft’s official announcement of Exchange 2010 can be found at the MS Exchange Team blog here. Exchange 2010 marks a significant milestone in the development of Exchange Server. Some of the most important features have been summarized below but many more exist that make this a compelling upgrade for all firms.
Please note that Exchange 2007 SP2 and/or Exchange 2003 SP2 are required for coexistence with Exchange 2010 in the same Active Directory site.
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- Dramatically Improved Storage Footprint and Large Mailbox Support – Changes in the underlying storage architecture allow for a 70% reduction in I/O over Exchange 2007 and a 90% reduction over Exchange 2003. This allows for more efficient usage of storage and results in the ability to store Exchange databases on slower/lower-cost disk such as SATA. This makes Exchange not only better performing for larger mailboxes but also more cost effective.
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- Native E-mail Archiving – With Exchange 2010, basic archiving features are now included natively, allowing firms to reduce the footprint of production mailboxes and improve client-side Outlook performance. While this functionality may not be as feature-rich as third-party solutions and even though it requires a to-be-released Outlook 2010 client to support it (or OWA 2010), it does present a much needed piece of functionality that many firms have desired natively for years.
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- Database Availability Groups – All of the Exchange 2007 high availability and disaster recovery methods (Local Continuous Replication, Single Copy Clustering, Cluster Continuous Replication, and Standby Continuous Replication) have been deprecated and replaced with a single concept: Database Availability Groups (DAGs). DAGs unify the concepts of high availability and disaster recovery into a single deployment and management process, thereby simplifying it dramatically over previous versions of Exchange.
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- Native eDiscovery and Compliance Features – Multi-mailbox search, legal holds, and improved retention policies all combine to increase the native capabilities of Exchange to assist with compliance processes and discovery requests.
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- MailTips – Exchange can now notify users if a message violates an aspect of IT or corporate policy (sending to unauthorized third-parties or exceeding a maximum allowed message size) or if the result of sending the message may be unexpected (recipient is out of the office or a distribution list contains a large number of recipients). This can enable users to better understand the results of sending a message and potentially reduce confusion and calls to IT.
Please refer to my three-part blog post series on Exchange 2010’s specific benefits for law firms (Part 1 can be found at http://blogs.kraftkennedy.com/index.php/2009/08/19/exchange-2010-benefits-for-law-firms-part-1-of-3/). Check back often for additional blog posts about the new features of Exchange 2010.