Microsoft offers a glimpse of Exchange 14

Exchange 2007 was a big hit in the messaging world. The product does require a bit of a learning curve for many admins, what with its new role-based structure and high availability (HA) taking center stage, not to mention the return of the command line with the PowerShell-structured Exchange Management Shell.

Nevertheless, the overall response is positive, recently solidified with the addition of a fourth HA solution called Standby Continuous Replication, additional ActiveSync policy control for mobile devices, and a new Public Folder Management Console.

Ah, so what do we have coming down the pike with Exchange 14? Another massive overhaul to the consoles and manner of working with Exchange? The removal of public folders forever? A few more HA and disaster recovery solutions? The answer: I don’t know. I can assume a few things based on experience, and that would be that Microsoft will not confuse admins with another new overhaul of the consoles, Public Folders will continue to have support in Exchange 14 (but probably not in the release following it as Microsoft is pushing for SharePoint solutions instead), and we will have new or improved HA/disaster recovery solutions. But Microsoft has been impressively tight-lipped about the details to its Exchange 14 development.

However, in the past week we have received the first “official” peek into the Exchange 14 world, and although it is a light, million-foot overview, admins are really excited to know what the future holds. Here is what we know for certain, thanks to the video released on the Microsoft Exchange Team blog site featuring Exchange Program Manager KC Lemson and Exchange Labs Program Manager Jim Lucey:

1. The underlying motivation for the redesign from the ground up of Exchange 14 is based on of a memo from Ray Ozzie dated Oct. 28, 2005, where Ozzie outlined the challenges Microsoft faces in pursuing supported services and software through its official Live services. An on-premise Exchange solution is still a key element to environments, but now Microsoft is focusing on deploying it as a service.
2. To truly see how Exchange performs in the cloud, Microsoft had to go outside of its traditional dog-food testing environment (which is simply the testing process in-house) because even at 100,000 users, Microsoft doesn’t have enough people to test cloud services. So the company developed Exchange Labs, which is a way for testing Exchange 14 in a high-scale multitenant environment. Exchange Labs has 3.5 million people (students, faculty, staff, alumni) within 1,500 organizations worldwide, which is an impressive demonstration of its ability to scale out.
3. The video didn’t answer most of my questions. This really is the first glimpse of anything E14 related, so stay tuned for more. However, I did see how users will have the ability to edit details in the Global Address List (GAL) and even create their own distribution lists in the future. Just seeing minor adjustments like that had me personally watering at the mouth for more.

Comments came streaming in to the team regarding questions and suggestions, which will hopefully be read carefully and pursued. One of the commentators (called Aunt Cleo, which doesn’t seem like a real name) had this to say: “It’s still using Jet and not SQL (I know, I know, unstructured vs. structured data). I figure all the supergeeks on the product team would have figured this out by now…. It’s still a single instance of store.exe. If store.exe crashes, all 50 of your databases go kablooey, too! Bad, bad, bad! It’s a difficult problem to solve, I’m sure, but I’d like to see store.exe being multi-instanced, like SQL! … Reduce reliance on RPC. Surely there’s a way to do MAPI over sockets, or something like that. RPC is just way too chatty and WAN latency is just terrible. Don’t tell me to use cached-mode, either. Cached-mode is only useful if you’re using the same computer all the time.”

And finally, Aunt Cleo writes, “OWA [Outlook Web Access] still does not have the capability of multiple tabs within the same frame window. Having another window open when opening/composing a message is aesthetically inefficient and sooooo yesterday!”

Now I find this kind of comment to be extremely helpful for the Exchange Team. I’m not one who rides the SQL vs. Jet bandwagon, but I can see Aunt Cleo’s point. I do agree with the need for store.exe to be multi-instanced and for RPC reliance to be reduced. And who wouldn’t agree with a new multitab, singular-frame OWA?

However, one of the biggest requests from people seemed to relate to support for non-IE browsers. Over and over again, the plea was for Microsoft to ensure OWA is just as functional in Firefox and Safari as in the Internet Explorer counterpart. Some folks either don’t have IE as an option on their system or they cannot be won back by the IE tabs now that folks have moved over and love Firefox.

The response? KC Lemson says, “Stay tuned for more details on browser support in the very near future.” What does that mean? It means they both read and understand the requests coming their way. Stay tuned for more. As for an official release time line: Everyone at Microsoft is keeping that to themselves, but they claim to be working on Exchange 14 for about 18 months, so we should get a schedule soon.

Where do you stand in the messaging world? Using hosted services? In-house Exchange or some other platform for your messaging? What would you like to see from the folks at Microsoft? They’re listening — and members of the team read this blog. Respectfully give your input and you just might be surprised to see it in the next release of Exchange.