Packaging of Exchange 2000

With the release of Release Candidate 1 (RC1) at the end of February, Microsoft provided the first glimpse of how Exchange 2000 would be packaged.

The most definite development was a statement that Exchange 2000 has become the “Exchange 2000 Product Line,” suggesting that various components or capabilities in RC1 would be segmented into different products or levels of Exchange in the future.

One such product has already been announced: Microsoft says conferencing functions would be sold as a separate Exchange Conference Server product. Microsoft says it is responding to customer concerns that they would probably want to run conferencing functions on a separate server rather than on a machine already burdened with e-mail and other critical collaborative tasks.

Less clear is how Microsoft plans to divide other features and capabilitities. It offered only a hint, saying that some of the features available in RC1 of Exchange 2000 might not be available in the final versions of the product.