Have You Heard About Exchange Online and the Exchange Labs?

Are you concerned about problems with multitenancy or scalability with your mail hosting service, and are you wondering what Microsoft’s plans are to address these challenges? A few months ago, with very little fanfare, Microsoft made some announcements about two initiatives you might want to hear more about—Exchange Online, a strategic play to release Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 as a branded hosted enterprise messaging service, and Microsoft Exchange Labs, a new research and development program directed at college campuses and designed to test, among other things, next-generation capabilities in scalability and multitenancy.

Microsoft Exchange Online
Microsoft Exchange Online is a step along the path toward the next generation of service-aware servers with multitenancy architecture, according to John Betz, who runs an Exchange Server technical product management team at Microsoft. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard about it. The announcement of Exchange Online was easy to miss—it was part of a comprehensive Online and Live services campaign Microsoft launched last fall as part of its drive toward providing software plus services (S+S). For more information, see Microsoft Charts Its Software Services Strategy and Road Map for Businesses. . . .