Eight months after shipping Exchange Server 2000, Microsoft is still working on Service Pack 1, which will hopefully make it easier for integrators to merge disparate mail systems and address resource issues in the current release.
Chris Baker, lead product manager for Exchange Server, says Service Pack 1 is coming "soon" and would add support for Windows 2000 Data Center as well as help companies undergoing mergers and acquisitions more easily meld different e-mail systems.
That task, increasingly common in recent years, remains incredibly hard, even though Microsoft promised to address the issue years ago.
"Our biggest issues have been around the consolidation of multiple [mail] environments, trying to get them to interoperate right," says a Midwestern integrator. "A lot of this stuff we use is SMTP and we have to write workarounds. This work is still a nightmare as it was three years ago. You have to set up an infrastructure that has named spaces, routing, and all the other things that make a mail system work and then try to get 10 of them to work together. To be fair, [Lotus] Domino is not much better. It's not the technology alone that kills you, it's the logistics and nothing can entirely automate that."
Service Pack 1, which integrators say is late, will also try to address complaints that Exchange still takes up too many hardware resources and aims to eliminate "nasty bugs," especially memory leaks, according to a Microsoft source who requested anonymity. Microsoft may talk about the release at Tech Ed next week. Baker declined to comment.
Longer term, Microsoft is back on the product treadmill. It must ensure that Exchange 2000 will run on Windows 2002 server, a.k.a Whistler.
"It is not compatible with Whistler server at this time. This is an especially large problem given that the SMTP, NNTP components that will ship with Whistler server are developed by the Exchange team," says the Microsoft insider.
The source says Whistler support will be addressed in the next release of Exchange, known internally as Mercury, which will also fix bugs and hone performance. Baker says Whistler support could be more dependent on Whistler development than on what's going on with Exchange. He also says the Mercury moniker is no longer being used at Microsoft.
Even further out, there are plans to move the Exchange data store to SQL Server, something that has long been bandied about at Microsoft. Insiders note that since last fall Microsoft Vice President Paul Flessner has headed both Exchange and SQL Server development.
Baker says that the Exchange data store has been evolving and continues to do so. The current store, for example, adds XML support. He confirmed that the next major release of Exchange will take advantage of some common data infrastructure developed in Flessner's organization. Moving to SQL will "give us some advantages along the lines of the abilities,availability, reliability, manageability ... performance, those are our mantras around here," Baker says.
In related news, Microsoft reissued a security patch this week that had been made available earlier to fix a vulnerability in Exchange Server 5.5 and 2000. The flaw could allow hackers to devise a program to delete or modify mailboxes of people using browsers to read their mail.
