Exchange 2003 To Ship In September, But Eyes Focused On Kodiak

Microsoft has stated in the past that the enhanced messaging server, formerly code-named Titanium, would ship midyear. Sources said the Exchange slip is natural since the Outlook 2003 e-mail in Office 2003 is an Exchange 2003 client. Office 2003, also originally due midyear, has been delayed until fall, sources said.

Channel partners have mixed views about the slight delay in Exchange 2003 but have even bigger questions about Kodiak, the next version beyond Exchange 2003.

At Tech Ed, Microsoft executives said Kodiak is now slated to ship in 2006 --one and a half to two years after the Yukon version of SQL Server debuts.

One Microsoft solution provider said the Exchange 2003 enhancements to Outlook Web Access (OAW) and mobility will help drive adoption over the next year, yet he acknowledged that Kodiak is a wild card that could stall sales of Exchange 2003.

"Exchange is in a very precarious position in between Titanium [Exchange 2003] and Kodiak," said the solution provider."The basic infrastructure of the e-mail will shift [to] Yukon in two years and that's a big change, so everyone is waiting for that."

Pushing back Kodiak might help lift sales of Exchange 2003, but customers are not happy about making a major infrastructure upgrade from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, and then another one from Exchange 2003 to Kodiak, which will have an updated data store.

Another channel partner wondered how much market inertia to Exchange 2003 will result because of the anticipation around Kodiak and migration requirements to the new Yukon data store

"Titanium is an interim release. This is considered an [Exchange] 6.5, where Exchange 2000 was 6.0," said one channel source. "The big change will be in Kodiak to SQL store, which was promised on Titanium."

In a briefing with CRN last week, Microsoft executives confirmed the fall release for Exchange 2003 but refused to discuss the potential for skipped deployments due to the magnitude of the next release.

"Kodiak is a couple of years off," said Missy Stern, product manager for Exchange."Customers can have confidence they'll benefit from the investments they make in Exchange 2003."

In the immediate future, she said she expects the fall release date for Exchange 2003 won't stall business this summer because the two versions of Exchange Server 2003 Release Candidate 1 released this week--standard and enterprise--are "high-quality, well-tested releases" that channel partners and customers can begin testing in a lab setting.

Exchange 2003 is the only version of the messaging server that will run on the company's recently released Windows Server upgrade.

Similar to Exchange 2000, Microsoft will make available a standard version for small to midsize businesses that supports between 50 and 5,000 users and an enterprise version for larger companies. The standard version will also be positioned as a front-end server for dedicated Outlook Web access, mobile access or mobile synchronization services, executives noted.

While the scalability characteristics are similar to Exchange 2000, Exchange 2003 offers major improvements for server consolidation, OWA, mobile support and antispam features, executives said.

For example, the user interface for OWA offers feature parity with Outlook 2003, and the overall performance of OWA is roughly 40 percent better than the previous version, executives noted. Microsoft has also enhanced OWA with spell checking, server-side rules and security enhancements such as automatic time logoff to enable more secure access from airport kiosks and other public portals, executives said.

The integration of Microsoft's Mobile Information Server will enable more mobile and wireless scenarios out of the box and save customers the $2 per-user client access license for Microsoft Mobile Information Server, formerly a separate product.

Microsoft claims it is not expecting that to affect deployment rates but is providing tools to make migrations easier. For example, the company will provide tools that will make it faster to move mailboxes from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003.

In addition to prescriptive guidance, Microsoft will provide tools that allow Exchange 2003 to be deployed in phases and co-exist with Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5. These include an Exchange Active Directory Connector that allows for co-existence and replication between the Exchange 5.5 directory and the Active Directory in Windows Server 2003.

The company is also offering more training for the channel, she said.

"We're doing a lot of training for partners around what's new and deployment methodologies," said Stern, adding that Release Candidate 1 includes better migration and deployment tools to help move Exchange 5.5 customers to the new server.

While some say the slight delay of Exchange 2003 might affect services spending and stymie Windows Server 2003 deployment, the deep freeze in IT spending makes Microsoft delays less burdensome for channel partners than in days past. And a three-month delay is no major headache regardless of the economic climate, others said.

"Most customers don't jump immediately at time of release anyway, so if it slips it's not a big factor at all," said Keith Coogan, CEO of Software Spectrum, a subsidiary of Level 3 Communications.