Just 15 years ago, few NZ corporates had internal email.  I recall in about 1994, working in a Queen Street law firm, connecting our MHS email (gosh, remember that) to that of some clients.  In those days, the internet was new, certainly in the commercial world, and we were being lured towards a competing 'commerical' standard called X.400.  The company I worked for took a buck each way, and went with both.  And wisely so as it turned out! 

Email was a bit of a novelty.  Fax was the preferred conduit of information, and of course, bicycle couriers! 

Looking back, wow, how things have changed!  

Email is now mission critical.  The most commonly used programme is your email client, typically Outlook.  We can't seem to spend time away.  We check our emails at home, and at work.  We all get emails from clients and colleagues at the most bizzare times of the day and night, which reflects not just the hours we seem to work these days, but also the need to use email to connect to colleagues in other timezones around the world.  Not only does email follow us home, but increasingly it follws us wherever we go.  Most of our clients have email on their phones, seamlessly connecting back to their office systems.  About the only time we don't check email is while driving or flying.  But even then, we're typically onto our messages while the plane is still taxiing to the terminal!

Most businesses use Microsoft Exchange.  A few use Google Mail, a very few still use Lotus Notes (interesting to hear Microsoft's COO, Kevin Turner talking about 'eradicating' Notes - as if its some sort of pest infestation!).  More than 50% of our clients are still on Exchange 2003, while quite a number have moved to Exchange 2007, primarily for its superior databae size capacity.  But calendar year, we can expect to see Exchange 2010.  Unveiled at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans last week,  it's now in public beta.

It's pretty hard (and let's face it - extremely brave) to move production users onto a beta server.  So let us summarise the key features for you.

Archiving - Typcially in New Zealand, our clients archive as a means of managing capacity.  With Exchange 2007, those constraints were largely removed.  But archive remains vitally important, mainly for legal compliance and forensics.  Up until now, archiving has been expensive, reliant on specialised consultants and third party software.  With Exchange 2010, archiving is built in.  Adminstrators can set 'retention policies' that users can apply, categorising and managing email based on it's purpose.  There is a 'legal hold' feature that allows an authorised company officer to dig into user's email boxes, including deleted items, looking for items of interest.  All this means that the collections of old PST files that many businesses have accumulated over the years can be dragged back into the Exchange store, secured, backed up, and are now searchable.  We have no doubt that we'll see a bunch of great utilities emerge to help businesses make meaningful sense of all these emails being retained.

Voicemail - With a large number of Voicemail servers replaced in the run up to Y2K, Microsoft are betting that many of these are up for renewal now.  And they are positioning Exchange as the perfect replacement.  Already, most of us are used to getting our voicemail messages emailed to us.  But what I like about Exhange 2010, is that it'll provide a transcription of the voicemail message as well.  And, if I saw correctly, it even translates a number of common languages, eg French into English.   So, if you are sitting in a dull meeting and you see a missed call from someone you've been expecting, you'll be able to read their voice message and respond accordingly.  

This can go further.  Already, if set up, you can 'ring' your Exchange server and play back emails over the phone, arrange appointments and so forth.  Microsoft's ideal scenerio is that you will be able to completely replace your phone system with Exchange and OCS, and have a totally unified messaging system.  It excites us as Kinetics, and we're moving to deploy these tools.  We'll be arranging demonstrations just as soon as we can, this is exciting stuff!

Cloud Colloboration - There is a lot of fuss around about cloud computing.  An awful lot of heat but very little light.  Some zealots are out there promoting cloud computing as the answer to world peace and hunger.  At Kinetics, we take a more pragmatic view, and a number of our clients will have heard me speak to this at length.  We see cloud computing as part of a solution.  It will suit some circumstances and not others.  Already, we've deployed clients with some users on internal servers, and some operating from nameless data centres, depending on what works best.  For the most part, we've had to take an all-or-nothing approach, which is inevitably a compromise.  Where we have mixed and matched, its been a bit of a cludge, albeit one that has worked extemely well.  With Exchange 2010, the cludge goes away.  Adminstrators will be able to have some of their system on internal servers, anywhere around the globe, and some on external hosted providers.  They'll be able to move users between these at the click of a mouse, allowing them to use their resources in the most effective manner.  To my mind, this is probably the most practical of the advances in Exchange 2010.  The applications are endless.  For example, head office can run from a local server wher the economics make sense, and have small branch operations working from a hosted provider.

For more information on Exchange 2010, check out this demo link