Lead Analyst: Peter Pawlak [bio]
Posted: Jun. 23, 2003

New releases of Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail server and Outlook client will be available in late summer 2003. Although radical changes to Exchange won’t come until the next release (code-named Kodiak), Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 products have important new features that can greatly benefit Exchange customers. The improvements to Exchange and Outlook will appeal to both users and administrators: users get improved usability and better access to their e-mail while mobile or working from home, and administrators get improved security, scalability, availability, recoverability, and manageability. However, Exchange still has some of the architectural limitations that hobbled earlier versions, and some functionality has been removed from the product. Furthermore, any current Exchange customers who want to host Exchange on servers running Windows Server 2003 must upgrade to Exchange 2003 first, because earlier versions of Exchange are not compatible with the new operating system.

This report assesses the changes and new features in Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 and is intended to help IT decision-makers evaluate the pros and cons of upgrading.