There’s been a small flurry of activity on a few MS focused blogs recently about Exchange 14 and, although I initially decided not to post about it, following a number of conversations I’ve had at work recently-I figured I would 🙂
Exchange 14 is the next incarnation of Microsoft’s ever more popular email system (no 13 for superstitious MS) and it certainly seems to be yet another great leap forward, as 2007 was over 2003. Microsoft’s entrance into the world of Software+Services means that Exchange 14 has been designed with cloud services in mind, making it the most scalable to date. Already there are 3.5 million users on Microsoft’s Exchange Labs via the Live@Edu scheme-surely the biggest Exchange deployment ever?!
An interesting bit of info from the Exchange Team is:
“Ferris Research just did a survey of several enterprise customers, and they found that the cost of running Exchange 2007 was roughly half that of running Exchange 2003. E14 will bring that cost down by a similar margin yet again.”
A clear sign that Microsoft can, do and will continue to save customers money while still delivering awesome products!
I’m looking forward to all the Wave 14 products but I find it hardest to get excited about Exchange if I’m honest. That’s because, as an end user, as long as it gets my emails from place to place that’s all I notice…all the fancy stuff I see is part of Outlook and thus Office 14. That said, Exchange 2007 had some great new features around UC that really enriched the UX (User eXperience) so I’m hoping E14 will too!
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 
Exchange 14 has a lot of benefit for the end-user too, particularly in OWA – keep an eye on the blog for the announcements as they come out 🙂