Web Store Overhauls Exchange Development Platform

Exchange 2000’s new Web Store positions Exchange for the first time as a strong platform for developing collaborative applications. Exchange, previously a messaging system with limited, layered-on application support, is now a full-featured collaboration platform targeting Lotus Domino’s reputedly superior developer tools. Despite the very significant improvements, there is still room for further improvement to close the gap with Domino.

Collaboration Development Improvements

Collaboration platforms support users who must share documents or must work together to process documents, such as insurance adjusters and clerks who must approve and process claims forms. Document sharing, sometimes referred to by the moniker “knowledge management” and dominated by Lotus’s Domino/Notes combination, is a major growth area in server sales. Microsoft’s improvements to Exchange are aimed at this market.

Web Store is critical to Exchange’s new collaboration capabilities because it supports almost every type of document or data object; allows many different users, on different devices, to view the same data at the same time; and offers powerful tools for tracking and routing data through an organization or a workflow process. These capabilities are a significant improvement from Exchange 5.5, in which the message store was limited to documents that could be accessed by the Messaging API (MAPI), and which offered fewer collaboration opportunities than Lotus Notes.