I was chatting to my colleague Michael earlier, and he mentioned and discussed the release of the Exchange 2010 Beta on the 15th April 2009 (Code named Exchange 14). I had been impressed with Exchange 2007 though notably with the release of their service pack so it was interesting to see what additional enhancements were to be found in Exchange 2010.

Those who work in Education may already have had a taste of Exchange 2010 in the form of Live@Edu. Having worked with some Universities, Schools and Colleges who have installed ILM to integrate with Live@Edu which are run on Exchange Servers I was already a little impressed by the web front End (OWA) or “Outlook Live” as Microsoft now calls it.

There appears to be little change in the underlying Architecture as opposed to the notable differences between Exchange 2003 and Exchange2007. This could potentially mean that upgrades from earlier mail platforms or migrations will be no more painful than those that have migrated to Exchange 2007 previously.
Looking at the some of the new features:

OWA\Outlook Live now supports not just Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer Versions but also Firefox 3 and Safari 3.

Email Archiving could potentially be a very good selling point for Exchange 2010 especially for those that do not currently use a third party archiving system.
LCR(Local continuous Replication) and (SCC) Single copy clusters has been removed from Exchange 2010 but it has increased the storage reliability and due to the it’s shift in view with regards to on-site (CCR) and off-site (SCR) replication technologies where the mailbox data can be stored on inexpensive local disks and to replicate databases between servers rather than using expensive SAN-based replication. As up to 16 copies of each database can be provided this does allow for disk and even server failures and allow administrators to even do mailbox moves and routine maintenance with users still logged on.

A feature which has been around on bulletin boards for years whereby you can use threaded conversations has now been incorporated into outlook and OWA.
Mail tips reminds me of the Office Paper clip but apparently more useful as it warns you about sending emails to external users especially if the emails are of a sensitive nature and another example would be to warn you that you are sending an email to a large distribution list. Commonsense errors which many of us may have done or heard about in the past.

Role-based access control is a nice feature added to Exchange 2010 which allows for example HR to search through certain mail stores or allow you to assign permissions to Helpdesk to do their job.

A useful feature found in Exchange 2010 for businesses is the ability to share free/busy information with external entities such as external business partners.

It would be interesting to see how the new “office 14 suite” will integrate with Exchange 2010 as some of the newer features of Exchange 2010 are part and parcel with the new Office suite. This should come out later in the year.

What is interesting to note is that the beta version is not only supported on Windows server 2008 64 bit but also on Windows Vista 64-bit editions service pack 1.