InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 10, 1997
Exchange 5.5 Beta Scales Up
No storage limits, Internet standards support improvedBy Jeff Angus
The condition of this first public beta is surprisingly solid where the promised features exist, but a surprising number are yet to be implemented. On balance, we have to reserve judgment until a more feature-complete release arrives.
While recent Exchange beach-heads into large sites have been significant, the single greatest deal-breaker for large shops was the prior versions' 16-Gbyte message store (about 500 heavy users). Microsoft says storage in the 5.5 version is limited only by the nu
mber of megabytes you can muster. Microsoft clearly wants to use the next version of the NT operating system's intrinsic support for clustering-which will break the barrier of physical storage limits, as well as provide failover-to get into more large enterprise accounts.
To support the new scale, the Exchange team has implemented some features that can make administrators' lives easier. One of the most demanding tasks has been downloading revised address books to the client. The 5.5 process downloads only changes and added or deleted records, shaving bandwidth requirements. The product also now supports modular address containers, a blessing for large organizations. This is an advantage when each user in a division acting as an independent business, for example, needs only the addresses of other employees and resources in that division, making the address book easier to manage.
Unintended Benefits
The company also says the back-up performance for the message store has been increased to 15 Gbytes per hour, although we didn't test this beta for back-up performance.
With this beta, Microsoft has also addressed the issue of clients supported. New Outlook clients for 16-bit Windows and for Macintosh users look and act like the 32-bit version. We were disappointed, though, that one of Outlook's best features, a preview that gives you the first couple of lines of a message without having to open it, wasn't implemented in the Windows 3.1 version.
While the
software has lifted the ceiling from the number of users you can keep, it will still be some time before it's easy to administer a system of the scale that 5.5 supports. For example, Exchange now supports recovery of deleted messages-the server retains deleted items for a specified number of days. You can set the interval for all users simultaneously and customize individual users one at a time, but you can't use roles or groups to tweak large numbers of users simultaneously.
The overall design of the administrator's primary console for the mail server is a positive, considering the breadth of functions here. It takes advantage of the two-panel Windows Explorer interface to present services and instances, though the metaphor doesn't always hold up. Mail servers, for example, are nested very low in the hierarchy, conceptually opposite of what the existing Explorer would lead you to think. Still, it's an administrator console and though the interface isn't elegant, it's utilitarian enough to use regularly.
One of the added Internet connection features also takes advantage of the new increased storage ability. Support for mail clients supporting the IMAP4 standard means remote and mobile users can work with their accounts from any machine with access to the server, because the mail is stored on the server.
Other Internet connection features include security features, including server-to-server Secure Sockets Layer encryption over SMTP and an anti-"spoofing" authentication logon that you can configure to accept or reject a connection on a server-by-server specification. Connections for Lotus Notes exist on this beta, and ones for SNADS and PROFS will be in a future beta.
While what's been implemented is surprisingly free of crashes and bugs, you should also note this beta version is missing some features planned for the shipping Exchange 5.5. Visual Interdev, Microsoft's scripting tools for creating truly programmable HTML pages, was missing from the product CD-ROM. Documentation is also in beta, so imple
mented features don't always have full documentation. This affected our ability to test the new scripting features that let IS departments develop routing applications for E-mail and forms that support simple workflow applications. And the new ability to recover deleted messages from a server was inaccessible in our installation, though Microsoft has implemented it in this version.
If you decide to test the Exchange 5.5 beta in your shop, you'll find it looks solid enough to support the existing features well, but you'll have to wait for future betas or invest a lot in phone-support time to test some of the most interesting new features.
he first release candidate of Microsoft's upcoming mail server, Exchange 5.5, is aimed at filling in key checklist items E-mail administrators and network managers have said were missing from prior releases. The flood of new features in the upcoming release come in two areas: scalability and support for Internet standards. The intent is to strengthen Microsoft's argument for Exchange as an enterprise-scale server and as an Internet connection.
Through this mechanism, Exchange can host multiple address containers on a single physical netw
ork. This ability has a potential unintended benefit for organizations that find their employees losing productivity because of the tidal wave of extraneous E-mail that people feel obligated to read. By segmenting project teams, an organization can restrict non-project-related mail that comes in, winnowing distractions. It's not a solution every organization needs, but some might try experimenting with it on a team working on a deadline-driven project.
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