First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a first look at Microsoft's Exchange Server 2010 Beta, noting several usability, reliability, and compliance improvements over Exchange 2007. Top among Exchange 2010's new features are OWA support for Firefox 3 and Safari 3; improved storage reliability; conversation views; mail federation between trusted companies; and MailTips, a sort of Google Mail Goggles for the corporate environment. 'Database availability groups give you redundant mail stores with continuous replication; database-level failover gives you automatic recovery. I/O optimizations make Exchange less "bursty" and better suited to desktop-class SATA drives; JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.' Exchange 2010 will, however, require shops to upgrade to Windows Server 2008, as support for Windows Server 2003 has been dropped. Microsoft will release technical previews of other products in the suite, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010, in the third calendar quarter."
there are these entities called corporations/companies. they are required to follow a lot of laws and in some cases retain all communications for many years. Exchange makes this easy because it centralizes everything for easier management.
2010 looks more like 2007 R2. Same engine but more features and support for it's new ActiveSync partners, Google and Apple.
the archiving and legal features look nice. right now you have to buy add on products from EMC and other companies. Integrating the SOX features into Exchange will save customers a lot of money.
Exchange database engine is also called "Jet", but it's a different kind of Jet: Access is Jet Red, Exchange is Jet Blue. The difference is explained here.