Development of Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007 won’t be completed until sometime in December, and the software will be made
available shortly thereafter even though the company plans to launch the server at an event in late November.
Microsoft officials have confirmed that Exchange 2007 won’t reach release to manufacturing, or RTM, until sometime in December. Once
that milestone is reached, however, the software will be available within a few days.
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The official line from Microsoft had been that Exchange would ship by the end of the year or early in 2007.
But the company recently announced that Exchange 2007, which is now a 64-bit platform only, would be part of a launch event
Nov. 30 in New York that also includes the long-awaited release of Vista and Office 2007. Those two will only be available
to volume-licensing customers.
Availability for consumers won’t come until Jan. 30, Jim Allchin, co-president of the platforms and services division at Microsoft,
announced this week.
According to a note by Ferris Research analyst David Sengupta, Microsoft already has over 80,000 production mailboxes deployed
on Exchange 2007.
The server features a new role-based architecture that supports functions such as remote client access, transport/routing,
mailboxes and unified messaging. The current versions of Exchange give users two deployment options, front-end servers and
back-end servers. Exchange also includes new clustering features, unified messaging capabilities, support for the PowerShell
scripting language, improved ActiveSync technology for mobile devices and upgrades in Outlook Web Access and search.
