Stronger than steel

UNLIKE ITS WINDOWS OS family or its Office suite, Microsoft’s Exchange Server is not an inescapable fact of life. After all, if one is merely looking for e-mail delivery, it’s hard to compete with the simplicity of a Linux box running sendmail. But when you find yourself in need of calendaring, task management, and other group-work functions, your choices narrow to the Big Three of integrated collaboration environments. Enterprises adopt these higher-end messaging-plus-workflow products to help smooth basic business processes, particularly the human interaction critical to the working environment.

There’s actually an interesting parallel to Detroit’s Big Three in their heyday: IBM’s Lotus products are the Ford of the lot — they were there first, but allowed nimbler and better-promoted competition to seize market momentum. GroupWise from Novell reminds us of Chrysler — occasionally innovative, but constantly in danger of being squeezed out by the inexorable laws of finance. That leaves Exchange in the role of Gen-eral Motors — bland, inwardly focused, and concerned that the competition might die off, leaving the company vulnerable to antitrust watchdogs.

The 2003 model year is an important one for collaboration environment vendors: All three of the majors will be releasing new versions of their software or have recently done so, as is the case for IBM, which shipped release 6 of Domino/Notes this past fall(see ” Deal with meetings “). Although we expect Novell to make GroupWise 6.5 available in a matter of weeks, the real action will be in the forthcoming Exchange Server 2003 — code-named “Titanium” and internally designated as “Exchange 6.5” — which is shaping up as the Exchange release that we can finally respect.

Exchange 2003 is due sometime midyear, and it will run on Windows 2000 Server with Service Pack 3 or Windows Server 2003. As one might expect, taking advantage of some features of Exchange 2003 — including improved clustering, key management, and RPC (remote procedure calls) over HTTP — will require running the latest version of Windows. From a client’s perspective, Outlook 11 — also due later this year(see ” Cornering the office “) — will offer the optimal experience by supporting local caching of the user’s mailbox file and compression of data between client and server, this being perhaps the best justification for submitting to yet another Office upgrade.

Shops that have stuck with Exchange 5.5 are going to have their hands full if they upgrade directly to Exchange 2003, because an in-place upgrade from the former to the latter simply isn’t possible. Instead, Exchange 2003 must be set up on a separate server and then connected to the Exchange 5.5 environment to relocate mailboxes and databases to the new box. The alternative (if there’s no chance of being able to beg, borrow, or steal the hardware) is to perform in-place upgrades to Exchange 2000, then to repeat the process when you’re ready for Exchange 2003. But we can’t recommend this option because it breaks our rule of not asking existing hardware to go through multiple upgrades to applications, directory services, and/or operating systems without a wipe-and-reload.

The internals of Exchange 2003 are similar to Exchange 2000, but three big changes will affect admins and users alike. First, in Exchange 2003, the information store is no longer mapped to a virtual M: drive. That should keep “ordinary” file system operations, such as simple backup programs and file-based anti-virus scanners, from corrupting the data in the information store, while allowing access to the store through a UNC (Universal Naming Convention)-based namespace. (It’s “.BackOfficeStorageDomainName”, in case you’re curious.)

Second, the Key Management Service built into Exchange 2000 that enabled key archival and recovery functions — which weren’t provided in Windows 2000 — is no longer necessary, rendered redundant by the enhanced PKI services in Windows Server 2003. Finally, the chat, IM, and unified messaging features of Exchange 2000 have been split off into “Greenwich,” a collaboration server still under development. Upgrading from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 won’t disable these real-time collaboration options, but any improvements will come when Greenwich ships in late 2003.

But what Microsoft taketh away with the left hand, it giveth back with the right — so the trade of features is even enough to constitute a wash. The functionality of MIS (Mobile Information Server) is now an integral part of Exchange, removing the requirement for a separate Exchange-plus-MIS server when enabling remote users to reach the corporate Exchange site via wireless networks.

The other major improvements in Exchange 2003 come in OWA (Outlook Web Access), in which the user interface now looks like the full-blown Outlook, if you’re using Internet Explorer 5 or later as a Web browser. Under the new OWA with IE, item windows retain the user’s sizing preferences within a session, server-based spelling check is available for multiple languages, Outlook’s Tasks feature is supported (except for Task Requests), and server-side rules for how e-mail should be handled upon receipt can now be created and managed. In addition, OWA users running IE 6 on Windows 2000/XP clients can finally use e-mail encryption and signing features.

Because Windows Server 2003 was only available as a release candidate during our test, and we wanted to minimize the amount of prerelease changes to our Active Directory schema, our first-look testing of Beta 2 took place on a server that we upgraded from Exchange 2000, leaving the existing Windows 2000 OS intact. Overall, installation went smoothly — although it was clear that the upgrade routine was designed for sites using Exchange 5.5 — and our only quibble was with the organization of the documentation supplied by Microsoft. In our view, the Getting Started guide should be a dozen or so pages, and the Technical Reference should be 300-plus pages, not vice versa.

Overall, Exchange 2003 looks to be the product to beat for future entries in the collaboration market. Many of the problems with earlier versions (especially those relating to security and Web access) are eliminated or at least reduced to the point where they are no longer showstopping faults. We normally kvetch whenever a vendor reduces a product’s features, but in the case of Exchange 2003 we consider the simplified wireless connectivity worth the wait for improved real-time communication in Greenwich.