Microsoft Dribbles Out More Titanium Info

Titanium, the next version of Microsoft Exchange Server, will focus on cutting total cost of ownership via server consolidation and blurring the lines between online and offline use, Microsoft said this week.

Next week, Paul Flessner, senior vice president of the .Net Enterprise Servers at Microsoft, is expected to unveil some of the product's new perks at the MEC 2002 conference in Anaheim, Calif.

Last Tuesday, IBM's Lotus Software group touted the TCO benefits of the newly shipping Domino and Notes 6. Major new thrusts there are server consolidation, spam filtering and lower TCO, said Scott Cooper vice president of Lotus Solutions. The new products support S/MIME security and Smartcards, he said. (See related story)

Microsoft's Titanium release, tailored for use on the upcoming Windows.Net Server, will bring with it enhancements to MAPI, the company's Messaging Application Programming Interface by which the Outlook client communicates with the mail server.

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"We're reducing the bytes going over the wire, so the amount of communications between client and server is down and we're further compressing data over the wire. We think we'll get greater than 50 percent compression," said Chris Baker, group product manager for Exchange.

These enhancements will make it easier for branch offices to consolidate mail servers, even placing them remotely, he said. The goal is to cram more and more mailboxes into fewer and fewer servers. At Microsoft internally, "we had a 3X reduction in mailboxes going from Exchange 5.5 to 2000 and are now looking at a 5X reduction in Titanium," Baker said.

On the security front, the next Outlook Web Access client will support S/MIME so mail can be signed and encrypted.

The new Outlook/Exchange combo will ease communications for sometimes desk-bound, sometimes mobile users, Baker said. For one thing, the system will store more of user information locally.

"We want users to seamlessly move from connected to nonconnected modes without closing Outlook down and bringing it back up," Baker said. "You will work against a local copy of your data, and when you undock you'll have that. When you're back online the system will sync that up in background [to server-based data," he said.

The new Outlook 11 client, due next year, will "sense what type of connectivity you have, recognize if it's dial-up and be smart about what info it comes back with over that small pipe," Baker said. "It'll bring back only [message headers not the entire message or attachments if it's a slow line," he said.

Domino/Notes has offered similar replication options for some time, industry observers said.

That software can now also detect the use of "spam beacons" in incoming messages and block them. Spammers sometimes embed these beacons in messages, so that even if the mail is viewed in the preview page, the recipient address is verified as real and active to the sender.

Other previously announced features in Titanium, slated to ship next year, are support for up to eight-node clustering, and "volume shadow copy" technology, which eases the backup and restore function when a server goes down.

Titanium is in early beta with a limited number of partners now. A larger beta is due by year's end.

These vendors cannot talk about total cost of ownership enough, observers said. "The Domino 6/Titanium messages are remarkably similar because in this economic environment IT managers have to build a business case to justify upgrades," said Meta Group Senior Vice President Matt Cain.

"They both talk about bandwidth efficiencies because that will lead to server consolidation and that's where you save money," he said.

Solution providers said Microsoft has made incremental progress with this Titanium release.

"These are mostly refinements," said Richard Warren, chief strategy officer at Internosis, Arlington, Va.

"They've got some nice clustering stuff. This is a fairly heavy revision, much more than a service pack, but mostly it shows maturation for Exchange," said Robert Ginsburg, CTO at Version 3, Columbia, S.C., solution provider.

There is room for upgrades. Many Exchange customers are not even yet on the current 2000 release, analysts said. Of the current installed base, anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent of customers are on 2000, while the rest are on Exchange 5.5 or earlier.