Getting Ready for Exchange 2010

Rick Wilson  December 4 2009 02:07:53 PM

A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity to talk with a number of current and prospective customers at the Exchange Connections trade show in Las Vegas.  One of the overwhelming questions we received was how the release of Exchange 2010 was going to affect third party archiving products such as Archive Attender.  

Microsoft has made it clear their intent is to support larger mailboxes, and there are a number of enhancements in Exchange 2010 (I/O reductions, changes to the physical layout of database, better management tools, etc) supporting this goal.  With regard to archiving, however, we believe it is important to examine all of your needs– not just the narrow set of features that 2010 offers.  

For example, if managing the physical storage requirement of the Exchange database is important, the peer mailbox mechanism of archiving in 2010 is not very helpful since it forces archived messages to reside in the same storage group.  The same can be said of the limited policies available to move data into the archive mailbox, a relatively anemic e-discovery search facility and the inability to ingest PST data.  

In light of these limitations, we believe there will continue to be a need for more robust third party products such as Archive Attender even after customers migrate to Exchange 2010.  Sherpa’s development team is currently hard at work testing our products and addressing some of the small MAPI inconsistencies cropping up in the lab.  Sherpa is also working with the recently released beta version of Outlook 2010 and will continue ensuring Archive Attender will fully support Exchange 2010 early in the first quarter of next year.

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