The Experts Conference has a very deep technical lineup of Exchange sessions planned. The event is April 25-28 in Los Angeles. I will be conference chair again this year.

The agenda includes:

• An opportunity to sound off on what you like and don’t like about Exchange Server, and where you think Microsoft is missing out compared with other messaging platforms like Gmail, Lotus Live, Cisco and others. Your feedback will passed on to Microsoft’s Exchange team after the event.
• Depending on Microsoft development timeframes, we hope to be able to run a session on Exchange 2010 SP1.

Other sessions on the agenda include the following Microsoft speakers:

• Scott Schnoll and Ross Smith IV speaking about the many facets of Exchange 2010
• Konstantin Ryvkin speaking about Microsoft’s internal deployment of Exchange 2010
• Brett Shirley speaking about the internals of the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), B-tree splits, etc.

Unified communications content will include:

• Lee Mackey speaking about his hands-on experiences on many Office Communication Server deployments
• Anthony Vitnell speaking about the challenges of Microsoft/Cisco unified communications coexistence

This will not be a marketing event, but rather a deep technical conference. If you’re planning to attend, send us an email — we’d love to see you there.

David Sengupta. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is Chief Architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

Exchange 2010 includes archiving and e-discovery; these need powerful indexing capabilities.

Third-party on-premise archiving vendors struggle constantly with indexing technologies. Indices get corrupt and take days or weeks to regenerate. Searches return results that aren’t as expected, or aren’t understood. Indexing technologies age, and when a vendor replaces them, your corporate memory looks very different.

To understand the challenges, think of Outlook:

• It’s often hard to find email in PSTs.
• You frequently don’t get what you’re looking for.
• You get “indexing is not complete” messages.

Now consider e-discovery on a corporate scale. Searches become critically important. For example, you may need to defend your CEO against accusations that might land him in jail; your CEO is certain that an email is there, but the search tool can’t locate it. In the meantime, you have five days to find the email, and the clock is ticking.

Exchange 2010 includes a new discovery module that searches primary and archive mailboxes, and works across multiple mailboxes. It is built by one of the smartest teams in the Exchange product group. However, it’s unclear whether or not the search will be good enough. If it’s like our experiences with Outlook search, the answer is no.

We think Exchange search should be a lot better than that of Outlook. Nevertheless, the challenges are substantial, and there is a good possibility that it won’t be up to the job. For example:

• Important file types may not be supported.
• Documentation may be unclear on how to adjust the index, and when adjustments need to take place.
• Users may not understand the results of a search.
• There may be problems with non-English searches.
• Wildcards and stemming support may be limited.

We would welcome input from readers on their practical experience with Exchange 2010 searches in the stressed and demanding environment of e-discovery.

… David Sengupta

The single most important technology change of our time is happening around the cloud. Entire industries are being changed or made obsolete. The world as we know it is changing fast.

Examples of what has changed:

• Paper-based maps and manual navigation have been replaced with cloud-based maps and GPS systems.
• Photography has shifted from film-based to digital, with processing and often photo albums primarily cloud-based.
• Books are moving from paper-based to electronic paper or digital, with cloud-based ordering and digital library functions.
• Email systems are transitioning from on-premises to cloud-based solutions.
• Print media and advertising have largely gone online.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have moved online.

And examples of what is likely:

• Enterprise telephony will shift from on-premises PBX to cloud-based VoIP solutions.
• Home-based landlines will be replaced by mobile phones.
• Backup and recovery systems will move to the cloud.
• Systems management will move to the cloud.
• Archiving and compliance will move to the cloud.
• E-discovery solutions will move to the cloud.
• Systems with heavy processing requirements will shift to elastic compute technologies.
• File storage will move from local computer-based or external hard drive-based to primarily cloud-based.
• What remains of fax will disappear.
• Human-operator-based conference call bridges will go away.
• Translation services will be mainly automated and go online.
• Paper-based billing will be completely replaced by online.

In each case, the primary technologies and delivery mechanisms will move to the cloud. On-premises solutions will become the exception, not the norm.

As you navigate town with your GPS, BlackBerry by your side, with your new Kindle reading your ebooks to you via text-to-speech as you drive, we suggest you reflect on this. The shift towards the cloud is compelling, and in some ways, irresistible.

…David Sengupta

If you care about compliance, the “Drafts” folder in your Inbox needs to be archived.

Archiving vendors take several approaches to email archiving. Some access mailboxes via MAPI and pull items out into the archive. Others intercept SMTP traffic and journal a copy into the archive. Others copy the database transaction logfiles (’log shipping’) and rebuild the email database for archive reasons.

Journaling only captures what has been sent. MAPI and log shipping capture the Drafts folder.

This story on CNN contains a nugget about why archiving Drafts is important. “A Yahoo! e-mail account was set up so the men and militants could communicate …. E-mails were never sent from the account, but people would leave messages in the draft folder and delete them after reading.”

Whenever a law or compliance regime exists, people will try and get around it. Archiving Drafts is necessary for compliance.

… David Sengupta

Whistleblower website Wikileaks recently leaked more than half a million text messages around 9/11. We hesitate to even link to the story, but if you must read it, you can find CNN’s coverage here.

There is something sacred about the last messages exchanged with a spouse before a loved one dies. Messages of love. Hurt. Panic. Fear. Impending death. Yet we struggle with a lust for information, and the Internet makes it easy for us to disrespect personal privacy and ethics.

E-discovery brings with it an element of responsibility. Whether investigators are searching email, text messages, or other electronic data, there is an implied code of conduct around how the evidence is to be handled.

Posting these messages online represents a breach of privacy and a rupture in the ethical standards that should exist in any modern nation. In the words of one of the commentators, corkpuller, “deep wounds that have healed need not be reopened for the morbid curiosity of those who want to sell more soap and toilet paper.”

… David Sengupta

A highly publicized hack into the email server at a prominent client-research center highlights one of the problems with email evidence. It is far too easy to take things out of context.

In this case, over a thousand emails were taken and posted publicly. This has resulted in numerous accusations of collusion and warped data around global warming statistics in the blogosphere.

Scientists are accused of taking climate change data, and then wrongly adding their assumptions around “corrective” factors to normalize the data. The scientists claim they did so in an attempt to more accurately reflect reality. They claim opponents have not read their papers explaining why they adjusted figures the way they did. Opponents claim the scientists are hiding the fact that global warming isn’t as bad as the scientists claim.

Opinion. Perception. Lessons learned in the school playground. He said. She said.

One of the fundamentals of human existence is that each of us perceives the world through the lens of our particular world view. We live trapped within our context, and cannot be as objective as any of us would wish to be. An ancient Chinese proverb says, “If you want to know what water is, don’t ask the fish.”

When it comes to interpreting the evidence – especially with something as ad hoc as email – it is absolutely critical to make every effort to understand the context within which a statement was made.

Claiming you have found a smoking gun, without having a clear understanding of the context, can lead to fatally flawed arguments. If you are building a case on such evidence, you are on shaky ground.

… David Sengupta

A recent bug in Google Apps allowed students to read each other’s email. Read about it here.

Imagine if your company and your competitor were both on Google. Now imagine stumbling across your competitor’s inbox. Whoops!

This underscores the importance of security whenever multitenancy is employed for email hosting. And it lends credence to customer concerns to have all their email encrypted when in the cloud.

And while this article applies to Google, the same could happen with Microsoft or any other vendor hosting multiple companies on a common infrastructure.

… David Sengupta

T-Mobile and Microsoft’s Danger subsidiary recently apologized to Sidekick customers for losing their data. According to an Oct. 10th announcement, a recent outage on Microsoft/Danger systems caused loss of “contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists, or photos” that are no longer on Sidekick devices.

The likelihood of a successful recovery was put at “extremely low.” This is yet another illustration of risks inherent in cloud services.

If you are a provider of cloud services, it’s paramount that you assess the end-to-end redundancy. Are SANs backed up? Are your data centers drawing from multiple power grids?

If you are considering cloud services, take heed. Ask your cloud services vendor to demonstrate how its systems are redundant. Ensure service-level agreements (SLAs) are signed with monetary penalties for unattained SLAs. And make sure your cloud vendors will be around when you need them.

… David Sengupta and Bob Spurzem

Email encryption will be greatly stimulated by the growing interest in cloud computing and in hosted messaging.

One of the primary concerns of any enterprise considering an outsourced solution such as Exchange Online, Outlook Live, or Google Apps is around the security of the data that will end up hosted in the cloud by Microsoft, Google, or another hosting provider. Email encryption is an important priority for early movers considering the cloud. It all comes down to trust. Companies don’t all trust the hosting vendors with their sensitive business data. And even if they trust the vendor, legislation is still evolving, and no company wants to risk its data being subpoenaed directly from the hosting provider without their consent.

The solution, then, is to encrypt all data stored in the cloud. This requires an encryption mechanism such as a Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) gateway at the perimeter between the customer premises and the cloud, or other mechanism. The infrastructure employed needs to be robust enough to decrypt data prior to being sent to partners and other email recipients. And in certain scenarios we foresee partnering companies to choose the same cloud services provider in order to take advantage of a federated cloud model in which all email remains encrypted when sent between partners, and never leaves the data center.

As a result, cloud solutions providers that master encryption early–and in a manner that is simple to implement–will have an important competitive strength.

… David Sengupta

Sometimes the most successful business comes from out-of-the-box thinking. When it comes to hosted messaging services, many solution vendors take an entrapment approach. Win customers over to your solution, and then lock them in so that you can squeeze an annuity revenue stream from them: per mailbox per month pricing, with extra billing thrown in as storage grows. And don’t make it easy for users to get off your solution.

This strategy is flawed. Many organizations are evaluating hosted messaging, and cloud computing in general; e.g., Microsoft Exchange Online, Outlook Live, Google Apps. Customers want a back-out plan in case things go wrong, or in case the service provider doesn’t deliver the quality of experience customers need. After all, email is the lifeblood of the enterprise, in many cases. And giving customers the standard answer of, “We’ll export your mailboxes to PST if you need to bail out,” is lame. Handing a customer terabytes or petabytes of PSTs isn’t anything more than a tail-light warranty.

I predict that solution providers who offer an easy, automated way for customers to migrate off hosted messaging–back to an on-premises solution or to another hosting provider–will end up with a substantial competitive advantage. This may be counterintuitive, but giving customers a way out is key to buyer confidence.

Customers want to be confident that whatever cloud solution they select will be there for them, regardless of the weather. No one likes the feeling of being trapped, and knowing that getting out is just as easy as getting in will reduce friction for customers who really just want to cut costs and reduce complexity. Excellence and cost-efficiency in outsourced messaging services should stand alone as drivers for choosing to move to the cloud. And everyone will benefit.

David Sengupta

Microsoft recently unveiled the Technology Preview of Microsoft Outlook 2010, which includes a number of new technologies that dramatically increase end-user productivity. We will highlight three of our favorite features, namely Quick Steps, Clean Up, and Paste Options.

Outlook “Quick Steps” can be accessed from a Quick Access Toolbar that sits at the top of the main Outlook 2010 workspace. Default Quick Steps in the Technology Preview (which may change in the final shipping version of Outlook 2010) include “To Manager,” “Forward: FYI,” “Meeting Reply,” “Team E-Mail: Reply & Delete,” and “Team Meeting.” Users can also create their own Quick Steps; for example, “Move to PST” or “Ignore Conversation.” So you can create a one-click rule in order to opt out of any conversation thread that you don’t care to get in your inbox, and either have those automatically moved to the Deleted Items folder, or have them moved to another folder or a PST. Being able to triage email faster, and in bulk, provides a substantial productivity boost to the typical knowledge worker who is spending hours every day sifting through email.

Outlook 2010 also includes a “Clean Up” feature that will automatically triage any redundant copies of messages in a conversation thread. For example, if there have been 15 emails in a particular thread, most of these emails will be represented in the last email in the thread, so all of the original messages can be cleaned up–either by deletion, archival, or other action as defined by the end user. In some ways this is similar to the old thread compressor add-in. In environments that are particularly chatty, Clean Up can cut down the email in a particular inbox by between 25% and 50%, reducing the number of clicks spent triaging email, and ultimately reducing the amount of time a user needs to spend cleaning up his or her inbox.

Finally, Outlook 2010 inherits a feature of Office 2010 called “Paste Options.” Simply put, Paste Options allow you to define how “Paste” will function in various applications. Historically, copying and pasting into Outlook has not provided much control over the format of the copied data. Copying from a Web site into an email message, for example, generally resulted in inconsistent formatting in the email, which needed to be cleaned up. Similar issues arose when copying from another email or from an Office document. The net result was time wasted editing emails prior to sending, just to ensure that font size and types were consistent throughout. Paste Options allow you to choose from several predefined options, namely:

• Keep Source Formatting
• Merge Formatting
• Keep Text Only

Any one of these can further be set as the default paste action:

• Within the same email
• Pasting between emails
• Pasting between emails when style definitions conflict
• Pasting from other programs

Users can even set default paste actions for pictures (e.g., paste in line with text, in front of text, behind text, etc.) Paste Options functionality, then, results in substantial time savings for end users who do a lot of copy and pasting into email.

We find that Outlook 2010 provides over 10% increased efficiency in time spent in email. Taken across a company of any size, and set against the inordinate amount of time the average worker spends in email, Outlook’s productivity enhancements may well represent the most compelling return on investment inherent in all of Microsoft Office 2010.

… David Sengupta

eFolder recently completed its acquisition of the DoubleCheck Email Manager solution portfolio from Network Management Group.

As interest in cloud computing continues to grow, more and more vendors are turning to managed service providers (MSPs) as a channel to reach hosted messaging customers. eFolder has historically provided white-labeled backup and archiving solutions to MSPs wishing to offer hosted cloud-based backup or hosted archiving solutions for customers. It runs a network of secure private cloud data centers. Similar vendors include Asigra, Mozy, and Carbonite.

eFolder customers typically deploy an appliance that connects to the cloud for backup and archiving purposes. The addition of DoubleCheck Email Manager provides eFolder with another appliance offering that performs email hygiene and policy enforcement. Indications are that eFolder will merge the technologies into a unified monitoring and management interface.

This acquisition paves the way for eFolder to provide simple, end-to-end encryption for customers wishing to move their backups and email archives to eFolder’s cloud. As we have written previously, security of hosted data–be that email or email archives–is a major concern preventing many customers from moving to the cloud. Having an on-premises appliance gateway could provide an elegant yet simple solution to give these customers the encryption they want in a simple manner. Obviously eFolder also has the added benefit of cross-selling into the thousands of DoubleCheck customers that have come along with this acquisition.

David Sengupta

Microsoft’s Exchange Team in Redmond has released Exchange 2010 to manufacturing. As reported by John Fontana, there are already over 5 million production users running on Exchange 2010.

Exchange 2010 takes on several existing markets. Email archiving vendors will feel the impact of native archiving capabilities. SAN vendors will feel the hit from native support for low-cost storage. And geoclustering vendors will be impacted by mailbox replication technologies now in the box.

The most significant change is that Exchange 2010 facilitates cloud services. Web-based self service capabilities, high availability, and deeper web services support all enable Exchange in the cloud.

The big question is whether Exchange 2010 will see a spike in adoption. Exchange 2007 deployments have been less than stellar.

Hats go off to the Exchange team on this major release.

…David Sengupta

Speech-to-text technology is nowhere near as good as many vendors claim. Often, operators are surreptitiously involved.

According to this BBC article, one of the speech-to-text conversion companies–Spinvox–has been found to convert voicemail messages using human operators instead of “advanced speech recognition software.” Patent filings by Spinvox reveal the depth of human involvement. Spinvox’s valuation has dropped 90% since this news has gotten out.

Plenty of such vendors do the same thing. Their contracts include fine print about being able to open messages for “quality control purposes.” They don’t state that in fact every message is indeed opened for quality control and editing.

The problem for the speech-to-text industry is that its automatic technology, while evolving rapidly, can’t do near-perfect translation. The human involvment means that users of speech-to-text have to live with numerous typos and other misinterpretations.

In the case of vendors like Spinvox, a shell game had emerged whereby vendors were trying to get ahead of the pack by employing vast teams of “editors” in Pakistan and other countries. No one knows how long this will have to continue, until automated technology is good enough. Thus many speech-to-text companies have had to maintain these pools of human assistants–along with the associated cost burdens–for an indefinite time. As a result, some companies have been bleeding cash.

In a sense, employing human editors would seem to be an innovative and useful approach. But sometimes this simply leads to everyone playing the same game. All the spin quickly leads to an overinflated market and things crash.

Customers would be wise to read through the fine print of vendor claims if they are using speech-to-text services such as that of Spinvox. At the end of the day, if customers are happy with the service, and fine with the security risks of having people halfway around the globe reading your email, it’s not necessarily the end of the world to have your voicemails transcribed to text and sent to you in under a minute.

…David Sengupta

Microsoft has released the Release Candidate for Exchange Server 2010. You can download it from this location.

Before we share our perspectives, we’d like to hear your first impressions … respond to this blog once you have kicked the tires on this new version of Exchange Server!

… David Sengupta