By all predictions, this year is expected to see a lot of migrations to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 from older versions. Of course, one reason for that is the number of organizations that are still running Exchange 2003 and face the upcoming end-of-life of that version. But even businesses already running Exchange 2007 might find benefits in Exchange 2010. And one solution for making the transition to the latest version as seamless and cost-effective as possible would be to consider moving to a hosted version such as Microsoft's Exchange Online or the upcoming Office 365.
As the second in this series looking at Exchange 2010 architecture in relation to the Exchange Server 2010 Architecture Poster, which will be included in the March 2011 issue of Windows IT Pro, I talked to Jon Orton, a senior product manager on the Exchange team with Microsoft. Jon focuses on Exchange Online and is involved with the Office 365 private beta. We talked about the "rich coexistence" organizations can run with Exchange Online and on-premises deployments of Exchange Server. Jon also discussed the benefits to businesses and IT pros when you move your messaging systems to the cloud, as well as what admins and users will get with Microsoft's hosted offerings for Exchange.
(Check out the first article in this series: Exchange 2010 Architecture: Microsoft's Adam Glick Talks About EAS)
Jon: I know that some of the other interviews you've had with the people on the team have centered around the Exchange Server 2010 Architecture Poster coming up [in the March 2011 issue of Windows IT Pro]. So, for Exchange Online, one of the questions I get asked a lot is what's the same as Exchange Server and what's different? Looking at this Exchange Server architecture poster, it's remarkable how many of the things on the poster apply to Exchange Online and Office 365. So instead of giving you a spiel on Exchange Online and what it is, maybe I can walk around and highlight a few other things.
So as we look at this poster, we see some of the things are the same. Starting at the left, in terms of management, remote PowerShell is available in Exchange Online. The Exchange Control Panel—we have a web-based GUI that gives a great deal of control already in the online environment.
It interfaces with the Exchange server and gives a full-featured experience. Role Based Access Control is built in to Exchange Online and Office 365. Customers can get permissions and slice and dice them to meet their company's needs and give administrators and Help desk people the right level of control for their environment. Unified messaging and voicemail are available as a hosted service, and features like call answering rules, voicemail preview, integration with a phone system on-premises, message waiting indicator—all that's there.
In the Mailbox server box [on the poster], as far as Personal Archive capabilities, management retention policies, legal holds, the ability to recover deleted items, multi-mailbox search for e-discovery—these are all available in Exchange Online. And so on as we march across the poster and talk about end-user things for client access, like mobile device access for ActiveSync, Outlook Web Apps across different browsers, MailTips, support for all the latest Outlook features, all that's the same.
Now granted, some things are different, and any those are easy because you don't need to worry about them in a hosted environment. So for example, database availability groups are used in Exchange Online to provide high availability with replication across geo-redundant data centers, but all that is taken care of and implemented for you. There's no need to plan out storage architecture for cloud users—you get 25GB of storage per user by default. There's no need to configure Edge and Transport servers and so on because you have Forefront outlined for protection for Exchange doing the antivirus and antispam protection built in to the service at no extra charge. People familiar with Exchange Server think about Exchange Online, and one of the great things for them is that they can take things they know—Exchange Server concepts, feature sets, administration—and make them portable to the cloud.
One thing that's not shown on this poster is how Exchange Server and Exchange Online can coexist. We actually considered adding that to this poster, but it was getting a little crowded. Built-in support for hybrid deployment is one of the best kept secrets about Exchange Server 2010. Administrators have the ability to take their Exchange Server deployment on-premises and extend that environment to the cloud and enjoy something we call rich coexistence. If you have a mixed deployment of users in Exchange Online and users in Exchange Server, they can share calendar free/busy data between the cloud and local users, and you can also do some things as far as management and administration. For example, you can use the Exchange Management Console to manage your cloud users and the part of your user base that's on-premises—features like out-of-office message, MailTips, and mail tracking.
Understand that the cloud organization and the on-premises organization for Exchange are really the same organization—they don't treat cloud users as being external to the company. Which also lets customers, if they want to, move users back from the cloud to their on-premises Exchange Server environment in a very easy and seamless way. Instead of having to export data to PSTs and re-create accounts manually on-premises, they can just click a user in the management console and return them back to on-premises. So that's great for doing low-risk pilots and things like that.
The coexistence capability also means that when you move users to the cloud, their Outlook profile in the mailbox is preserved. So when the user is moved to the cloud, they're just reconnected through Autodiscover to the cloud mailbox, and their OST file is preserved so that mailbox content doesn't have to be re-downloaded and take up network bandwidth. The user can seamlessly switch over. There's a bunch of smaller features with that. But that, at a high level, is the hybrid story.
The interesting thing about this story is for customers running Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 today on-premises, they can get those capabilities simply by putting in an Exchange Server 2010 Client Access server and configuring some federation capabilities. There's no need to upgrade their entire organizations to Exchange Server 2010 if their goal is to move straight to the cloud. So the magic ingredient there is the Exchange 2010 Client Access server. That's sort of how it works at a high level.