Microsoft Seeks Exchange Help

At the vendor's TechEd conference in New Orleans earlier this month, Paul Flessner, senior vice president of .Net enterprise servers at Microsoft, said the company is dedicating additional resources to its unified data model.

Solution providers said that move has prompted Microsoft to turn to third parties to help usher Exchange 2000 into the .Net era. To that end, the vendor has distributed an updated Exchange 2000 Web Services toolkit to TechEd attendees. The kit includes sample calendar, contact and workflow code, and .Net training.

For example, solution provider eOptimize, Vancouver, British Columbia, used Exchange to build a health-care scheduling solution, said Earnie Glazener, Exchange product manager at Microsoft. "It's not uncommon for Microsoft to look at a [project time line and feel that if we can't accomplish it in that time frame, to farm it out," he said.

Though .Net-enabling Exchange offers opportunities, such projects can be resource-intensive, solution providers said. Some said they haven't decided whether to take the plunge.

"If Microsoft was the only company offering collaborative Web services, [Exchange would still be perceived as a proprietary and hard-to-work-with solution," said Robert Ginsberg, CTO at Version3, Columbia, S.C. "With third parties doing the work, the perception is that the platform can offer more access to the collaborative environment than Exchange delivers internally."

Other solution providers said Microsoft is dropping the ball. "They're saying the migration to the next [.Net version of Exchange is contingent on the new SQL-based store, which is not due until next year," said one solution provider who requested anonymity. "They are conceding two to three years of stagnation. Microsoft is on a soapbox telling us to convert Domino [users to Exchange but isn't providing any new tools to do so."