In a 5/16/08 Reuters interview, Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris Capossela said that he expects more and more companies to abandon their in-house messaging systems and shift to “cloud computing” as a less expensive alternative. Capossela made the claim that, “in five years 50 percent of our Exchange mailboxes will be Exchange Online.” Considering this accounts for over 150 million mailboxes, that is a very significant claim.

A shift of this magnitude will have a ripple effect over the industry. First, it will impact the job demands for Exchange Administrators. As more and more companies pull the plug on their Exchange Servers, the demand for administrators will decrease. Second, it will impact the entire food chain of resellers, system integrators, and third-party vendors who supply software and services to support in-house Exchange. And finally, it will directly compete with existing Exchange hosting providers with a much lower cost of goods.

We can only speculate why Microsoft would make such a dramatic change to its existing Exchange business. Perhaps it is in response to competition by Google Gmail. Or maybe this is just part of a major IT shift to cloud computing. No matter what the reason is, it is a clear sign that the role of in-house IT is changing.

… Bob Spurzem

Orchestria is a leading vendor of data leak prevention technology. The company has a nicely schizophrenic approach to policy definition. There are two user interfaces:

• One for the nasty bits, where you use a human-unfriendly scripting language to define the catch filters and such.
• One that defines the easier things, like whether the filter triggers a block or a warning, and the string that’s presented to the user.

Architecturally, that feels right. All things being equal, it’s good to shield as much of the nasty bits from users and administrators. Geeks (e.g., perhaps your harmless correspondent) exist to deal with the nasty bits.

… David Ferris

Given that Exchange 2007 was released more than a year ago and is a stable product, you might think everyone has already moved to it. In fact, organizations have a number of reasons for postponing the move. Samples of what I hear are:

• My current Exchange 2003 system is working fine.
• The new Exchange 2007 requires new server and storage hardware and I do not have the budget.
• The old Exchange is easy to operate and I do not have the time to master the new PowerShell commands.
• My current PST situation is a mess, but Exchange 2007 offers nothing to help.
• User mailboxes continue to grow, but moving to Exchange 2007 will only make matters worse.
• I am too busy with other more pressing projects.
• I am going to wait for the next version of Exchange and skip the 2007 release.
• I am considering switching to an online email service such as Exchange Online.

If you are considering moving to Exchange 2007 and have not yet made the move, we would love to hear your reasons why.

… Bob Spurzem