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E12 Beta 1

Last week, we signed off on E12 Beta 1. This is a great milestone for the product and the team. We've delivered SP1, SP2, ExBPA, and many other great tools along the way - but E12 has always been our primary goal in the 2 years since Exchange 2003 shipped. 

Right from the beginning, our high level goals for E12 were pretty simple:

- Control: A new admin experience, enable low cost storage
- Access: A unified communications inbox, accessible all of the ways end-users want it
- Protection: Enable compliance, encrypt and clean the message stream

The team will be blogging about various aspects of these 3 themes over the coming months. I am very pleased with our team's progress towards these goals. Many of our customers will see storage costs reduced 80%. Monad changes everything when it comes to systems management. My calendar experience with E12 is something I cannot give up. I am personally addicted to my E12 mobile device experience. I think the speech recognition built into E12 unified messaging is the coolest thing ever. The server is keeping my email usage totally compliant with our company's records management policies. There is so much more...

Our immediate plans are to distribute this release to a group of 1400 customers and partners that have expressed explicit interest in testing this release. Unfortunately, we don't have room to support more right now - but early next year, we plan to distribute the release through MSDN and TechNet subscribers. I hope most of you get an opportunity to try out the release, and give us feedback. We're eager to hear from you. 

Here at Microsoft, we are now running E12 Beta 1 for 3,000 users (including the entire Exchange team, the entire Office team, the MOM team, the SBS team, the Speech technologies team, the Windows Mobile team, and many other lucky folks). I always think it's cool to check out our latest "dogfood" topology (which is intentionally over-complex to test a variety of configurations).

On to Beta 2 mid next year...

Happy Holidays to everyone from the entire Exchange team!

- Terry Myerson

Published Monday, December 19, 2005 3:34 PM by Exchange
Filed Under: ,

Comments

 

Alexey Kuznetsov said:

Dear Terry!

Is there any way for us (MAPILab) to be included in this beta-testing program? We are very VERY interested in it.

Thank you in advance.
December 20, 2005 5:35 AM
 

Rick said:

Can you provide a larger (clearer) picture of your dogfood topology?
December 20, 2005 8:05 AM
 

Rich said:

Indeed, dogfood topology is unreadable. Also any more spippets of info on the complicance features of E12? Is this goign to be pitched against archiving products like AfterMail and Symantec Enterprise Vault?
December 20, 2005 8:54 AM
 

AG said:

• Control: A new admin experience, enable low cost storage

First - What was wrong with the old admin experience? Granted the old admin experience probably is not perfect, but will this new admin experience be perfect?
Also on adding admin features - From my experience every time MS introduces ONE new way to admin machines they introduce ONE HUNDRED new bugs in that feature admin that can compromise my system. Just lookup WMI bugs or Windows management bugs and see what you get.

CONTROL - Your control goal should be this
"The ability to"... lol I almost gave yall a great idea for free. Good luck with taking on Google...

December 20, 2005 10:43 AM
 

AG said:

• Access: A unified communications inbox, accessible all of the ways end-users want it

Great work here! Keep it up!

• Protection: Enable compliance, encrypt and clean the message stream

Can you explain what you mean by Protection?
December 20, 2005 11:16 AM
 

Exchange said:

The link to the dogfood topology is fixed. MSN Groups insists on scaling it down for some reason.

- KC Lemson
December 20, 2005 2:16 PM
 

MarkS said:

Will E12 storage be based on SQL Server instead of a Jet database?
December 21, 2005 5:40 AM
 

Ponch said:

ONE HUNDRED New Bugs? Please name those 100 bugs that are introduced for every ONE new way to admin something, or can you only speak in hyperbole?

December 21, 2005 9:47 AM
 

AG said:

"Just lookup WMI bugs or Windows management bugs and see what you get."

There are too many bugs to list but here is a start;
Windows 2000 Sp4 fixes:http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=327194
Goto the Management and Administration section

Windows XP Sp2 fixes: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5BLN%5D;811113

Again goto the Management and Administration section

Anyone have a link for the bug fix article for Windows 2003 Sp1?
December 21, 2005 2:16 PM
 

Stewart said:

I received an invitation for the E12 Beta. I have worked on Exchange since 5.0 and am very interested in testing the new product. Is there anyway to know if and when I will have access to the Beta? I have written reviews on the product in the past and am anxious to get a head start on its features...

Thanks,
Stewart
December 21, 2005 4:14 PM
 

Alexander Zammit said:

Is there any reason why this is a closed beta. I think it’s a pity.

Many organizations are investing a lot in MS technologies. Giving them access to betas doesn’t sound like asking too much.
December 22, 2005 1:27 PM
 

Adam said:

@Alexander
I second that.
December 23, 2005 10:34 AM
 

Sven Marxen said:

Happy Holidays, you made a great job this year.
This site is the source of information I always searched for.
Kind regards from Germany
December 23, 2005 3:54 PM
 

DanielP said:

MarkS - no, SQL-driven DB is not a part of E12. *Maybe* on E13...

Happy new year all!
December 26, 2005 6:13 AM
 

Brian said:

Will the new version of ESM address the lack of Organizational Forms management? With E2K3 you can't rely on ESM to find and/or count how many forms you have. Also having to use Outlook to backup your forms is a pity.

There are also some tools out there that MS has made that I think should be merged as features into ESM. Those would be PFDavAdmin and ModifyItems (Used to 'touch' items to force replication).

Keep up the great work!
December 29, 2005 10:34 AM
 

Riccardo Moretti said:

Will E12 allow administrators to delegate a mailbox move role, without having to give that user Full rights to exchange?
January 11, 2006 4:07 PM
 

Roland said:

I attended the IT-Forum last november in Barcelona and was quite astonished by all the things demonstrated by the Exchange team about E12. So I was anxiously waiting for the conference DVD so I could show all these beautifull things to my colleagues. But much to my suprise the DVD contained material from all sessions but nothing about E12, why is that?
January 12, 2006 6:10 AM
 

GaryDSmith said:

I agree. An open beta would help all developers make important decisions on what can or cannot be used in forthcoming projects. I need to know about the Workflow Integration but cannot find any info on this subject.
February 1, 2006 9:43 AM
 

Brian said:

Have there been any major changes to Outlook Web Access? Any new/improved features?
February 7, 2006 11:08 PM
 

Eric McWhorter said:

Please tell us if we will see the ability to choose the SMTP proxy address which will appear as the FROM address for outbound SMTP email.  This is a severe inconvenience for those of us out there managing multiple SMTP domains for distinct DBAs in a small company.

Thanks!

- Eric
February 15, 2006 12:57 PM
 

Exchange said:

Thanks Eric,

I have forwarded your comments to appropriate people! This is still a subject to discussion at this time :)
February 15, 2006 3:19 PM
 

Eric McWhorter said:

Thanks, Exchange!  I hope we can see that functionality.  I've tried the 3rd party stuff out there and it just doesn't do what I need it to.

- Eric
February 16, 2006 11:41 AM
 

You Had Me At EHLO... said:

When we released Beta 1, we promised the release would be available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers early...
March 1, 2006 3:00 PM
 

John said:

I have allways been dissapointed in the recovery of Exchange (more than 6 stores and 200GB) and was looking forward to it being released on SQL.  Is it not moving to that because of cost? If so then the Enterprise edition should seperate that limitation.  Also has there been improvments on the "dial up recovery" model?
March 5, 2006 5:46 PM
 

yinjie[Exchange MVP] said:

March 24, 2006 4:55 AM
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