Exchange Server beta leads next generation of Microsoft Office

Jake Widman
Thursday, 16 April 2009 02:17

Business IT - Technology

The public beta of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is the first entry in the suite of Office 2010 and related products Microsoft plans to release by sometime in...2010.

Exchange 2010 adds e-mail archiving to help companies meet growing compliance, legal, and e-discovery requirements.

It also promises to give users the "ultimate inbox experience," according to the announcement.

Features contributing to this experience are text previews of voicemail, grouping related e-mails into a single thread, and the ability to opt out of a thread of irrelevant e-mails.

The new MailTips feature is supposed to keep users from committing "an e-mail faux pas," like sending messages to people out of the office or outside the organization.

Exchange Server 2010 is also designed to work both on premises and as an online service -- either or both.

And it integrates Office Outlook Web Access and Office Communicator Web Access to provide unified communication through a browser, including Safari and Firefox in addition to Internet Explorer.

The final version of Exchange Server 2010 is scheduled to be available by the end of this year. The public beta is available at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010 .

For more on the rest of Office 2010, see Page 2.