Exchange, then and now
Did you know that with this latest release, Exchange is already in its 16th year?
In its early days Exchange 4.0 was nothing more than a simple e-mail solution. E-mail at that time was not even a business critical application and certainly not every user had an individual mailbox. During the past 15 years, the number of features, functions, and integrations with numerous other applications has expanded heavily. Ever since Exchange 2007, one could describe the product as a true unified messaging and communication solution. That description is still true today.
Out of the box, it not only includes e-mail messaging, calendaring, and contacts, just like in the early days; but it also adds archiving, shared folders, strong integration with Microsoft Lync, and Microsoft SharePoint to name just a few of the key functionalities.
From an architecture point of view, a lot of investments have been made to make it even more solid product by building further on and enhancing its features with regards to high availability. Where organizations needed to invest in expensive and complex clustering solutions to make Exchange 2000 and 2003 somewhat highly available, continued replication was Microsoft's first attempt to incorporate high availability into the product in Exchange 2007 and is basically the ancestor to the Database Availability Groups we know today. Although clustering is still used under the hood, Microsoft did a good job hiding the complexities as much as possible.
Exchange 2010 was the first version that really allowed storing data on cheap JBOD SATA storage. The replication mechanisms used in Exchange 2007 were updated and improved in Exchange 2010, which introduced Database Availability Groups (DAG); a feature that has been carried forward in Exchange 2013. A lot of effort was also put into optimizing load balancing. Inexpensive layer 4 load balancing, without requiring affinity, is now a supported scenario, potentially driving down the overall cost for load balancing.
This brings me to the latest trends in the IT industry, being "the cloud" and "mobility". Microsoft took its first steps towards a cloud-based Exchange Server environment back in 2008 with its BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) portfolio, which is nothing compared to what we have in Office 365 today. By making use of the so-called hybrid deployment scenario, which is basically creating a virtual Exchange organization across your on-premises Exchange and Exchange Online, companies now have a flexible way of using cloud services while still keeping some of the workloads on premises.
From a mobility point of view, Outlook Web App (OWA) is almost as feature rich as a full Outlook client. There are still some features missing, but gradually OWA is becoming a great alternative! The user experience can now be identical on all types of devices, no matter what device you are connecting from (regular desktop, laptop, ultrabook, tablet, or mobile phone), regardless of the operating system it is running (Windows, iOS, Android)
With that said, I think we have outlined a good overview of where Exchange is coming from in its early days, and what an enterprise communication oriented application it is today.
