John Merrill – First Look at Exchange 12

The Discussion

• 

  I like how he said "we will let you access your data very easyly with OWA"
  
  now it makes it ever so clear why microsoft purchased foldershare.
  
  for people like me, who wouldn't need the power of an exchange server, just a simple user, who still wants to have all my contacts, emails, calenders avilable online, will a similar interface be developed for hotmail? which i hope gets changed to live.com
  
  right now for me atleast it's abc@gmail.com i would love a abc@live.com
  
  great ui, and as you said, this can be used as a replacement to outlook.
  

• 

  man, your office looks like a warzone!
  

• 

  The new version of hotmail really is a lot like the interface for OWA.
  
  Although it's not quite as fast as that.
  
  

• 

  Robert,
  
  Thanks for the great video, it was very interesting to see Exchange 12 and OWA.  Looking forward to it. 
  
  Was wondering if either you or Joh Merrill or someone from the Exchange could answer the question about Exchange12 and other products requiring 64-bit.  I know it was discussed in a post in the Coffeehouse.  Interesting that it is currently on Slashdot as well.
  
  

• 

  DevilsRejection wrote:

  will a similar interface be developed for hotmail?

  
  Microsoft is launching a totally new Hotmail and it will look a lot like Outlook/OWA hybrid.  You can already see some previews at
  http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/msn_kahuna_preview.asp

• 

  He said OWA for Exch2003 was the first AJAX app.  First AJAX app for Microsoft or from anyone?  Wasn't it in Ray Ozzie's email about how OWA began AJAX but really didn't expand upon that?

• 

  I think he said OWA for Exchange 2000, not 2003. I remember it was already quite good, and that was waaaay before everybody started talking about AJAX.

• 

  CannedSoda wrote:

  He said OWA for Exch2003 was the first AJAX app.  First AJAX app for Microsoft or from anyone?

  
  
  

  mawcc wrote:

  I think he said OWA for Exchange 2000, not 2003. I remember it was already quite good, and that was waaaay before everybody started talking about AJAX.

  
  
  OWA for Exchange 2000 literally was the grand-daddy of AJAX. AJAX leverages the XmlHttp object for communication with the server "in the background". The XmlHttp object in IE was developed primarily for OWA.
  
  A few articles MSDN later and a team I worked on started using it for internal corporate web applications. The Soap wizard & web behavior shipped and things became simple. Skip forward a few years, an XMLHttp implementation goes into Firefox/Mozilla and Google picks up the stick and runs with it.
  
  There's guys on the team I used to work with that regularly deconstruct the gmail / gmap code. The Google developers seem to have learnt a lot tricks to really push the performance.

• 

  mawcc wrote:

  I think he said OWA for Exchange 2000, not 2003. I remember it was already quite good, and that was waaaay before everybody started talking about AJAX.

  
  
  With WebOS back in 1999 we were doing AJAX and browser client side app code before OWA. Allthough we didn't use XmlHttp at the time since it didn't exist afik, we had an API quite similiar to Windows Forms or Java Swing. Netscape 4 compatability was painful...
  
  Anyways, the things we're seeing now is roughly what we had before the "dot-com death".
  

• 

  Charles,    
  
  What Gartner report indicates that Exchange has over half of the business e-mail market? 

• 

  Hi Ed,
  
  I think he may actually have been referring to the IDC report
  
  Or it could have been the Radicatti Report of 2004
  
  Or the Ferris Research Report
  
  As you're probably aware the Gartner Report actually shows MS with slightly below 50%
  
  I also believe there's a newer Gartner report which shows the stats closer to 50%
  
  Sorry for the confusion - hope that this clears it up.
  
  
  

• 

  A couple of observations.
  
  John states that since Exchange 4.0 there have been 64 API's for Exchange. He agrees that this is confusing. So in Exchange 12 they are adding a few more?!
  
  
  John tries a couple of ways to access his live production Exchange 12 server and fails. He states that it must have been taken down to upgrade. Shouldn't there be some resiliance in a production system, for example cluster members which will cover for a node being upgraded?
  
  Seems that E12 makes it more complex and less reliable.