Interim Exchange, Outlook Upgrades Coming in 2003

Microsoft plans to release a modest update to Exchange in summer 2003. The upgrade, code-named Titanium, will be released simultaneously with the next version of Office and the Outlook e-mail client. Titanium should help resolve some of Exchange 2000’s shortcomings, while improving its support of mobile users and preserving backward compatibility for developers. But the major upgrade that will follow Titanium, code-named Kodiak, will move the product to new APIs and a new database based on Yukon, the code name for a new storage, indexing, and search technology that will be shared by the next release of SQL Server, and is the key to Microsoft’s continued long-term success in the messaging space.

Interim Update Resolves Immediate Concerns

Titanium is intended to sustain Microsoft’s momentum in the messaging and collaboration space. Although the combination of Exchange and the Outlook client is the market share leader in the corporate e-mail space, Microsoft still faces strong competition from IBM/Lotus’s Domino server and Notes client, and an assortment of standards-based e-mail server products such as Oracle’s Collaboration Suite and Samsung’s Contact (formerly Hewlett-Packard’s OpenMail product). In addition, many Exchange 5.5 organizations still have not upgraded to Exchange 2000, a major redesign that shipped in fall 2000, mainly because upgrading requires them to first migrate from NT 4.0 domains to Windows 2000’s Active Directory.