Games - Microsoft Exchange Server

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	Games - Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is a messaging and collaborative software product developed by Microsoft. It is a part of their Windows Server System line of server products. The use of Microsoft Exchange is very widespread in large corporations using Microsoft infrastructure solutions. Among other things, Microsoft Exchange manages electronic mail, shared calendars and tasks, provides full support for mobile and web-based access to information, and can support very large amounts of data storage. It is positioned as a rival to the Lotus Notes / Domino server from IBM and competes with a number of competitors such as Scalix and Open-Xchange

History

The original version of Exchange was envisioned as a x.400 based mail server that also supported the x.500 directory standard. This product replaced the Microsoft Mail product originally acquired from Network Courier. Exchange was a client server based mail system that used a single database store. The Exchange 4.0 Directory formed the initial foundation for Microsoft's Active Directory service, an LDAP-compliant directory server. Active Directory was introduced in 1999 with the release of Windows 2000.

Exchange 5.5 was sold in two editions, Standard ("5.5/S") and Enterprise ("5.5/E"). They differ in database store size, "connectors," and clustering capabilities. The Standard edition has a database size limitation of 16GB, the Enterprise edition has a limit of 16TB - effectively unlimited for all practical purposes. The Standard edition is packaged with a Site Connector, MS Mail Connector, cc: Mail Connector, MS Notes Connector, Internet Mail Service, and Internet News Connector. The Enterprise edition adds on top of that: PROFS, X.400, and SNADS Connectors. The Enterprise edition can be clustered, while Standard cannot.

Exchange 2000 overcame many of the limitations of its predecessors, Exchange 4.0 and 5.5. For example, it raised the maximum sizes of databases and increased the number of servers in a cluster from two to four. However, many customers were deterred from upgrading by the requirement for a full Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure to be in place. This, in turn, required upgrading a company's servers to Windows 2000. Some customers opted to stay on a combination of Exchange 5.5 and Windows NT, both of which are no longer supported by Microsoft.

Version history

1996 - Exchange Server 4.0
1997 - Exchange Server 5.0
1997 - Exchange Server 5.5 (Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition)
2000 - Exchange 2000 Server
2003 - Exchange Server 2003 (Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition)
2006 - Exchange Server"12" (in development)

Current version

The current version of Exchange is 2003 SP2. It can be run on Windows 2000 Server (only if Service Pack 4 is first installed) and Windows Server 2003, although some new features only work with the latter. Like Windows Server 2003, Exchange 2003 has many compatibility modes to allow users to slowly migrate to the new system. This is useful in large companies with distributed Exchange environments who cannot afford the downtime and expense that comes with a complete migration.

One of the new features in Exchange 2003 is enhanced disaster recovery, which allows administrators to bring the server online quicker. This is done by allowing the server to send and receive mail while the message stores are being recovered from backup. Better anti-virus and anti-spam protection have also been added, both by providing built-in APIs that facilitate filtering software and built-in support for the basic methods of sender-IP, reverse DNS ("Sender ID" framework), and RBL filtering which were standard on other open source and *nix-based mail servers (more info in "Exchange 2003 Anti-Spam Filtering" section, below), also new is the ability to drop inbound e-mail before being processed. There are also improved message and mailbox management tools, which allow administrators to execute common chores more quickly. Others, such as Exchange Conferencing Server have been extracted completely in order to form separate products. Microsoft now appears to be positioning a combination of Microsoft Office, Live Meeting and Sharepoint as its collaboration software of choice. Exchange is now to be simply email and calendaring.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Microsoft Exchange Server ]

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