Microsoft Exchange 2010

Microsoft Exchange 2010 release will follow closely behind Windows 7 and there is plenty to be excited about. Windows 7 is looking fast and rock solid and Exchange 2010 has some great new features.

Microsoft is a leader when it comes to a vision around Unified Communications. Specifically I really like the voice mail to text feature that allows someone to receive their voice mail in text within an email. This will allow you to read your voice mails in loud places or when you are at a seminar and do not want to have to get up and step outside to retrieve a voice mail. Here is a summary of other Exchange 2010 features listed by Microsoft:

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 enables you to achieve new levels of reliability and performance by delivering features that simplify your administration, help protect your communications.

Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment based on your unique needs and a simplified way to help keep e-mail continuously available for your users.

Exchange 2010 mailbox database will allow you up to a 50% reduction in disk IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) over Exchange Server 2007, as well as greater resiliency against data corruption.

Building on previous investments in Continuous Replication technologies in Exchange 2007, a simplified approach to high availability and disaster recovery coupled with enhanced maintenance tools, will help you achieve new levels of reliability and reduce the complexity of delivering business continuity.

Exchange Server 2010 helps your users get more done by giving them the freedom to securely access all of their communications – e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and more – from virtually any platform, Web-browser, or device through industry standard protocols. Your users live their business lives in their inboxes every day. For so many organizations, Exchange has been the foundation of a universal inbox.

Exchange 2010 adds new productivity features that can help your users more easily organize and prioritize the communications in their inboxes.

In today's increasingly regulated environment, it has become critical to efficiently preserve business records. This includes e-mail which has quickly become the principle source of data in legal discovery and other compliance-related investigations.
But managing e-mail for compliance has become particularly challenging for most organizations. The problem is that, as e-mail volume grows beyond inbox storage limits, users are often forced to move this mail off e-mail servers and onto PCs and laptops as PST (personal storage) files. This isolates e-mail, making it more difficult to manage and search in a way that meets compliance requirements.

To address this PST problem and ease the compliance burden, Exchange 2010 delivers new, integrated e-mail archiving and retention functionality–including granular multi-mailbox search and immediate legal hold. When you combine this with the flexibility provided by the Exchange storage architecture, you can take better control of your corporate information, while providing your users with a streamlined experience that does not disrupt the way they manage their inboxes every day.

Despite all your best efforts, users make innocent mistakes handling sensitive corporate information every day. At the same time, there is always the threat of unauthorized users getting access to unprotected sensitive data. The issue has grown even more urgent in the face of increasing regulations governing customers’ and employees’ personal information.
Exchange 2010 makes it easy to better protect your company’s communications and e-mail through centrally managed information control capabilities. This includes the ability to intercept, moderate, encrypt and block e-mail more effectively. Together, this functionality provides you with a flexible range of protection and control options, whether you want to automatically enforce controls or empower users to implement their own data protection.