Microsoft on Monday made the Exchange 2010
Release Candidate available to the public, giving testers a chance to kick the tires before the final version of the product arrives later this year.
Exchange 2010 comes with improvements such as integrated email archiving, enhanced unified messaging support, expanded search capability, and the ability to transcribe voice mails into text messages.
Exchange 2010 combines on-site and off-site data replication into a single framework called a database availability group. With Exchange 2003 and 2007, each mailbox was tied to a specific server, but the new configuration allows mailboxes to reside on any server, which mitigates the impact of outages, said David Grantz, CTO of Exchangemymail.com, an Albertson, N.Y.-based hosted mail provider.
Exchange 2010 also includes performance boosts that will make life easier for Microsoft's hosting partners, using 70 percent less I/O operations per second (IOPS) than Exchange 2007 and 90 percent less than Exchange 2003, according to Grantz.
Microsoft plans to launch two versions of Exchange 2010: The on-premise version will arrive by the end of this year, and a hosted version will launch by the end of 2010. The latter release will bring full support for multi-tenant Exchange infrastructure and replace the current purpose-built version of Exchange that Microsoft offers hosters, Grantz said.
In a blog post, the Microsoft Exchange team said Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate is supported on the 64-bit versions of the Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Microsoft has endeavored to make the upgrade process as painless as possible, and users can install the Exchange 2010 RC and move to the RTM through an in place upgrade. The Exchange 2010 RC can also co-exist with Exchange 2003 and 2007 installments, the team said.
