Microsoft shares (officially) its future BPOS plans | ZDNet

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet brings us the latest BPOS roadmap announced at Mictosoft's Worldwide Partner Conference last week. The emphasis on selling SaaS is gaining ground at Microsoft, including free BPOS for partners, and more likely good deals for customers:

Microsoft showcased at the show this week a number of its partners who’ve already jumped on the BPOS bandwagon. To encourage others to start selling the suite, Microsoft announced that it will offer partners 250 BPOS seats for their own use.

Microsoft shares (officially) its future BPOS plans | ZDNet:

Sizing up the Exchange 2010 Integrated Archives

A couple weeks ago I posted information on Microsoft's Exchange 2010 beta announcement. Since this is Microsoft's first foray into email archiving as a product, let alone an integrated feature of Exchange, I was curious about the implementation and what customers could expect. I've now got some more answers and it looks like the new service falls somewhere between a local personal archive and an centralized email archival and records management system.

Bottom line, the Exchange 2010 integrated archiving is a feature of the mailbox server role and builds email archives on the same server as the live mailbox. The archive is stored in centrally managed Exchange message store that allows administrative access to archived message content and ediscovery capabilities. The end user experience in the mailbox is a separate folder for the archived messages. The archive does not support SIS or stubbing, and there is no tiered storage management or records management for archive disposition other than the global mailbox purge, retention and hold features introduced in Exchange 2007. As far as existing local personal archive PSTs, users can drag and drop existing archives to the server based store from their desktops (probably requires Outlook).

So far Microsoft is looking at the beta program to gain more insight on how this new feature will impact server performance and number of mailboxes the server can support. Exchange 2007 brought economies of scale by increasing the number of mailboxes supported by a single server and I'm curious how the increased archiving might impact that performance. I suppose this is more of a storage issue than a messaging service issue; storage will likely need to be increased on mailbox servers to support the archives.

One of the questions I have is how disruptive the integrated archiving will be on the current email archiving market and whether it will put partners out of business. In general, if customers need more robust archiving and records management the Exchange 2010 archiving will not be sufficient, but for remedying problems associated with personal archives and errant PST files the solution will likely be popular. At this point, customers that require heavy lifting with storage and records management they will continue to look to third parties that offer more control over the archives.

Microsoft Unveils Exchange 2010 With Public Beta

Microsoft releases Exchange 2010 for public beta today. From the press release:

A public beta of the server is available for download starting today at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010...Exchange Server 2010 will become available in the second half of 2009. Microsoft Office 2010 and related products will enter technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and become available in the first half of 2010.

Information Week provides some more details on the release, including some hints at Outlook Web Access upgrades:

Outlook Web Access -- and likely the other versions of Outlook, though Microsoft wouldn't confirm -- will include an instant messaging client compatible with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Live Messenger. Microsoft will offer APIs to allow other third-party IM clients to work in Outlook Web Access.

To me the big news is the integrated e-mail archiving, which finally gets Microsoft into the e-mail archiving market. Some are concerned about it being a disruption to the existing e-mail archiving vendors, however I think it's about time that there is more seamless integration of archiving into messaging platforms with centralized controls. I'm still unsure how it's implemented, which is all the difference if this is disruptive or not. My specific questions include where are the archives stored, what are the archive file formats, do the archives support stubbing/re-stubbing or single instance store, and does the archive system provide record disposition or tiered storage management?