Next Exchange to combine e-mail, voice mail

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just 20 percent in another six months' time. The company has also faced some competition from open-source competitors.

Exchange has emerged as a key component of Microsoft's business. In addition to being tightly tied to the company's mainstay Office business, Exchange itself crossed the $1 billion annual revenue mark last year.

While e-mail has become a critical component of most businesses, the software needed to manage the communications has struggled to keep pace. Microsoft has achieved the goal of high availability, Thompson said, but the software is not as easy to manage as it should be.

"High-availability e-mail is still too complex," he said.

One of the tactics Microsoft is adopting with Exchange 12 is the notion of roles. In a small business, Exchange might handle all the tasks associated with receiving, organizing, distributing and storing e-mail. Large companies, though, may want individual servers that handle only one or two of these tasks, and Exchange 12 will allow these roles to be automatically assigned and the work separated.

Among the other features planned for Exchange 12 are support for 64-bit computing and a "smart meeting picker" that can look at a number of people's schedules and choose the best possible meeting times based on a variety of criteria.

Today Exchange is sold in two varieties--a standard edition and an enterprise edition. Microsoft said it is too soon to discuss pricing or how Exchange 12 will be packaged.

Microsoft charges $699 per server for the standard edition of Exchange 2003 and $3,999 for the enterprise edition, which is aimed at companies with more than 5,000 employees. In addition, Microsoft charges a $67 fee either for each person or each device that is accessing Exchange.

Given its arrival date, Exchange 12 is likely to be the version sold when Microsoft ships Longhorn, the next version of Windows, which is slated to arrive on the desktop in 2006 and on servers in 2007. However, Thompson said that although Exchange 12 will clearly run on Longhorn, its features are not tied to any advances coming with Longhorn. At one time, Microsoft spoke of an array of products being tightly coupled with the release of Longhorn, though that vision has evolved as the company has scaled back some planned features of the new operating system.

Microsoft had originally planned to introduce an all-new storage schema into Exchange in a release code-named Kodiak. The technology was essentially similar to the WinFS technology that Microsoft originally planned to introduce in Longhorn. However, Microsoft has pushed back WinFS and now hopes to have it in beta form when Longhorn ships. It has not said when WinFS might find its way into the operating system. Exchange 12 will continue to use the same database mechanism that is used in its current incarnation.

[kenyee]

High availability email is easy w/ Lotus Notes/Domino :-)

You could do it way back in R4. Clustered servers over a WAN link which you can't do w/ Exchange because it needs a shared drive system ;-)
Put servers up in different cities and mail still works even if a city's server is trashed...