October 16, 2000

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Microsoft Widens Exchange 20001s Reach

qwest to offer hosted version; Wireless knowledge software will offer remote access

By Aaron Ricadela and Bob Wallace

More on Microsoft Exchange:

Microsoft's Challenge: Ensuring Office's Future Success (9/4/00) TKTKTK TechWeb: Microsoft Mixes Reliability, Rock'n' Roll (9/26/00) Network Computing: E-Mail Management, Computer Mail Services Praetor 1.5 (9/18/00)

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icrosoft is trying to make it easier for companies to manage E-mail and Office documents by broadening the reach of its newly launched Exchange 2000 platform.

Customers will be able to access Exchange 2000 via hosted services and wireless devices. Microsoft also revealed last week that Exchange 2000's Web Storage System, a database for storing E-mail, calendar entries, contacts, and tasks, will be part of the next version of Office and the upcoming document-management server, code-named Tahoe.

Qwest Communications International Inc. last week unveiled a hosted version of Exchange 2000. Customers of Qwest Managed Exchange 2000 access the software on a server at Qwest's data center for a setup fee that starts at $15 per seat and a monthly fee that starts at $25 per seat, which includes 40 Mbytes of storage.

Rhodes Inc., a $500 million retail furniture chain, is renting about 60 seats to improve communications among workers at its Atlanta headquarters. Rhodes plans to deploy the hosted application to its 80-plus stores and regional offices. "We don't have the cash, time, and manpower to bring the servers in-house and manage the service internally," project leader Robert Hunnicutt says.

Further bolstering Exchange 2000's reach, Wireless Knowledge Inc., a Microsoft-Qualcomm joint venture, said last week that its WorkStyle Server software has been enhanced to let remote workers with mobile devices access Exchange 2000. The software is scheduled to ship by year's end.

More improvements are on the way. Office 10, Microsoft's next-generation productivity suite, is slated to ship next spring with a local version of the Web store that will run on a PC. That will let users of Outlook--the E-mail client for Exchange that ships with Office--access data cached on their PC before looking to the Exchange server, speeding performance. Tahoe, scheduled to ship in the first half of next year, will let users search Web servers, shared files, Exchange public folders, and Lotus Notes databases for files.

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