This report provides CIOs, solution architects, and partners with a comprehensive introduction to evaluating Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook 2007 and planning their deployment

Contributing Analyst: Chris Alliegro

Upgrades for a pair of closely related server products that host Web portals will ship in Oct. 2003. Windows SharePoint Services, the successor to SharePoint Team Services and a free add-on for Windows Server 2003, makes it easier to create and customize team sites-specialized intranet portal sites for team and project information. When combined with Office 2003, Windows SharePoint Services supports common team-based activities such as document collaboration and meeting facilitation.

Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft’s product for hosting corporate portals, is also getting a major makeover. Unlike its predecessor, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is built on Windows SharePoint Services and, by taking advantage of that product’s use of the .NET Framework and underlying SQL Server database, scales much better than before. However, the radical design changes will orphan “Web Parts” built for the previous version of SharePoint Portal Server, and users of the new version must still purchase or upgrade Client Access Licenses.

More dependent on partners than any other major software company, Microsoft has recently modified its core partner program and significantly broadened the number of partners with which the company has formal relationships. The new program, which puts a high priority on serving small partners, tries to balance many competing requirements, such as the need to satisfy partners with one employee and those with thousands; the desire to allow virtually any company to become a Microsoft partner while still maintaining standards that assure other partners and customers of partner quality; and the need to market its products and services effectively to partners without overwhelming them with material irrelevant to their particular businesses. Companies that take advantage of Microsoft’s partner programs can tap Microsoft’s vast array of resources and market power to benefit their own business. At the same time, a partnership with Microsoft contains certain risks, such as the possibility that Microsoft might decide to enter a particular technology segment that the partner already occupies.

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

Contributing Analyst: Rob Horwitz

Navigating the complex array of Microsoft licensing policies, procedures, and programs is a financial and legal necessity for any organization using Microsoft software. A company that thoroughly understands Microsoft licensing and how it is changing can stay in compliance without paying for more licenses than it needs, and can budget intelligently for future software purchases. Recent changes, such as per-user licensing, Terminal Server changes, and new support options, make it more critical than ever that Microsoft business customers, salespeople, and service partners understand the company’s volume licensing programs so they can analyze their impact and plan accordingly.

This report offers a detailed overview of Microsoft licensing policies and programs and is targeted at executives who plan and manage IT systems, salespeople and service partners who sell them, and line-of-business managers who approve departmental IT budgets. The report-suitable for those just getting started as well as those who want to fill gaps in their existing knowledge of licensing-is designed to help organizations calculate the types and quantity of software licenses they need to buy, determine the best way to purchase these licenses, and evaluate upgrade options and strategies.

Microsoft is expanding the .NET Framework's libraries to include sophisticated graphics, better support for Web services, workflow programming to capture business processes, and a new user interface for authentication

The problems posed by e-mail-borne viruses to Microsoft-based systems and strategies to help reduce the risks to reasonable levels

For most organizations, e-mail is now a critical component of the communications infrastructure, second only to the telephone. In this context, Exchange 2000 makes a giant leap, from a workgroup product that was sorely stretched in large installations to a next-generation e-mail service capable of supporting millions of users on a 7×24 basis. This metamorphosis was not simple. To achieve substantially higher scalability, compatibility, and reliability over earlier versions of Exchange, the Exchange 2000 architecture embraces Internet technology and protocols and relegates most prior Microsoft messaging technology to emulation mode. The new architecture also relies heavily on features found in Windows 2000 Server and Windows Web Services (WWS), both of which are prerequisites for Exchange 2000 installation.

Exchange 2000 is an impressive product, but migrating from yesterday’s messaging environment to tomorrow’s will require significant effort for existing Exchange customers. While some customers may choose to rely on Exchange 5.5 for a while, dwindling support for Windows NT 4.0 may make the decision to migrate to Exchange 2000 a question of when rather than if. In order to help customers bridge the gap between yesterday’s environment and tomorrow’s, this Research Report

This report outlines the strategic importance of application servers, the main tasks an application server performs and how Windows Server 2003 carries out those tasks, and the major considerations when evaluating Windows Server 2003 against the competition

Explains the underlying technologies and strategic reasoning behind Microsoft's digital media products and services, including the wave of products released in late 2004, and identifies future directions

The digital era presents a problem for organizations whose business depends on controlling access to content: once in digital form, content can be copied an infinite number of times with no loss of fidelity and redistributed at lightning speed over computer networks. Rights management, sometimes called digital rights management (DRM), addresses this problem by allowing the owner of digital data to define what users may and may not do with that data-that is, their “rights” to that data-and enforcing those restrictions as the data travels among computers and other devices.

Today, Microsoft offers two distinct sets of rights management technologies: one for protecting digital media, such as movies or music, and one for protecting corporate data, such as documents or e-mails. Although functionally similar, these two technologies are intended for different audiences, are being developed by separate product teams at Microsoft, and are not currently slated to merge or evolve to use a common foundation.

Explains how Visual Studio 2005 removes many barriers to .NET platform adoption, exploits new capabilities in SQL Server 2005, and helps developers, testers, and project managers be more productive and work better together as a team

BizTalk Server 2004, the latest version of Microsoft’s platform for business process modeling and application integration, became generally available in Apr. 2004 and offers significant changes to the product’s underlying architecture, improved support for Web services, a new integrated development environment based on Visual Studio .NET, and a host of new tools and capabilities for business and IT workers. These changes will yield faster solutions, enable new scenarios (modeling human-oriented business processes, such as manager review and approval of employee expense reports, for instance), and provide new opportunities for systems integrators and ISVs, all of which will serve to drive BizTalk adoption. This, in turn, could further Microsoft’s push to establish Web services as the dominant industry standard for Web-based application and business interoperability, and .NET as the preferred development platform for creating Web services. However, BizTalk 2002 applications will need to be rewritten to run on the new platform and much of BizTalk Server 2004 is effectively version 1.0. Consequently, early adopters could see a degree of instability in the product and changes to services and interfaces in subsequent releases.

With its prime markets-desktop operating systems and desktop productivity applications-nearly saturated, Microsoft is looking to increase revenues by selling more server software, particularly server applications, such as BizTalk, Exchange, SQL Server, and Application Center. Currently, server products generate about US$5 billion of Microsoft’s revenue, but the company hopes to double that by 2005.

Microsoft’s biggest market for such servers is the enterprise data center. But breaking out of the desktop and into the data center is a massive, and risky, undertaking. Microsoft has begun the effort by focusing on what it does best: building software-in this case, software capable of meeting enterprise requirements. But having products to sell is only the first and perhaps not the largest challenge that Microsoft faces. The company must also

• Overcome its reputation for delivering buggy, unreliable software that requires constant updating and patches
• Integrate its products to provide broad