A First Look at Exchange 2010

Hi Tony,
Lucky me i found your website. I'm planning to implement exchange 2010 clustering in our company. On the previous previous of exchange 2003, exchange 2007 it requires enterprise for the exchange as well as the operating system.Kindly give me an advice what are the requirements fo implementing exchange 2010.Thanks in advance Waple02

Tony, You mention in your article that Exchange compresses attachments in the store - this is contrary to the information I have from Microsoft - they have stated that only the email headers and body text/html are compressed. These are the easily compressed parts of the mail object (low CPU cost) as opposed to attachments which would be CPU intensive and grind Exchange to a halt. .. Ken

Tony I found the article informative and interesting. I tend to agree with some that praise it not always deserved, on the other hand I do agree with you that they are moving in the right direction. My biggest disappointment is their reluctance to invest the resources necessary to move the exchange databases to SQL Server. Sometimes it makes no sense at all to me why they have not done this already. They dump how many man-hours and resources into developing high-availability, recoverability and scalability into their new releases of exchange when a lot of those options already exist in SQl Server. It seems like they are re-inventing a large part of the wheel here and in the process torturing us Exchange Administrators by getting us so close to what we need that we can taste it and then never really getting there. For instance - why is LCR restricted to a single database on a storage group? This would not be an issue with SQL server. As I said - they are moving inthe right direction, which is good, but when I hear things like "...the engineering investment to do this proved too great..." it makes me cringe. Too great?! For one of their core business aps?! Sorry - I find that hard to believe. On the other hand - when you're the '500 pound gorilla', how much does it really matter what other people think?

What about the licensing stuff? Is Microsoft going to go back to allowing the install of the Outlook client that ships with Exchange 2010 as long as you had purchased the CALS, just like up through Exchange 2003? Or are they going to maintain the ripoff deal like Exchange/Outlook 2007 and require customers to buy the full Office 2010 package or subscribe to Software Assurance in order to be able to install Outlook 2010?