It is my distinct pleasure to announce today the global availability of Exchange Server 2010. This has been an amazing journey from conception to launch, and the team has delivered an unprecedented line up of innovations in this release. I am incredibly proud of the team and our product.

The dedication of the Exchange community working side by side with us to deliver Exchange 2010 has been inspiring for me. I want to thank you for your commitment over the past 3 years helping us develop new ideas, make product enhancements and test pre-release bits to ensure our final product is rock solid. I believe Exchange has the most impressive IT Pro and Developer community in the world today. We could not have shipped this product without you!

In return, I hope you realize the full value of everything Exchange 2010 offers. We are all working in a very challenging economic environment today. Being cost conscious has never been more important - but also helping your organizations differentiate themselves and compete effectively is just as critical. I am delighted to see how Exchange 2010 is helping early adopters accomplish these goals. I want to share just a sampling of their stories, so you can see for yourself.

Organizations are cutting costs and simplifying administration with Exchange 2010.

"Performance with large mailboxes greatly exceeds our expectations. With the growing amount of data that needs to be retained, it is not uncommon for us to have 30-gigabyte plus mailboxes, making these performance improvements crucial to our business. I have been using Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 for e-mail since June and have been extremely satisfied with the performance and the user experience. It is a robust, very stable platform. And, we found RBAC to be a huge benefit. That is something I have needed for a long time-to have more granular rights for administrators and lower-level IT staff to do targeted tasks." - Alexander Diaz, Enterprise Development Manager, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP

"The cost savings from switching from fiber channel to SATA disks is about 70 percent. The I/O system of Exchange Server 2010 is really optimized. If you look at Exchange Server 2007, it's good; but Exchange Server 2010 is really great. You can significantly reduce the disk costs when you run Exchange Server 2010." - Thomas Keck, CIO, Elabs

"We're always moving users around. We've been doing that with custom scripts in Exchange Server 2003, but we will definitely be using the Online Move Mailbox feature in 2010. Now we can move them without taking the mailbox offline." - Allan Tagg, SVP, Global Messaging Exec, Bank of America

Organizations are improving everyday productivity and meeting the expectations of a new generation of workers with Exchange 2010.

"Our salespeople need to respond quickly to dealer concerns. With Exchange Server 2010 and voice-to-text conversion, within 20 seconds after a dealer leaves a voice-mail message, our users see an e-mail preview on their cell phone. Our mobile employees might check voice mail anywhere from 5 to 10 times a day, at 5 to 10 minutes a session. By using Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and taking advantage of the voice-mail preview feature in Exchange Server 2010, they can increase their responsiveness while saving more than 15 minutes a day. From a business perspective, that's an incredibly valuable productivity increase." - George Hamin, Director of E-Business and Information Systems, Subaru Canada

"Having Conversation View on the new mobile client is really nice. It provides an extremely fast and efficient means of surveying my inbox and taking needed actions on the go." - Steven Schafer, Director of Collaboration and Network Services, Global Crossing

"By taking advantage of Outlook Web App, employees can start being productive from new locations almost immediately. As soon as they get their workstation and network connectivity, administrators can quickly provide them with access to e-mail and IM at a moment's notice without having to manage a lot of logistics. That's tremendous. Just simplifying the process of giving our remote employees access to e-mail and IM with Exchange Server 2010 will increase the productivity of our IT administrators by at least 20 to 30 percent." - Dan Evans, Manager of Messaging and Collaboration, Morgan Keegan & Company

Organizations of all sizes are better managing risk and the cost of compliance with Exchange 2010.

"With Exchange Server 2010, we can give the auditors permission to pull mail out of mailboxes themselves, rather than having me pull the data and ship it to them in a PST file. Now the nine hours a month I spend on compliance will be cut down to zero. Getting rid of PST files using Exchange Server 2010 solves a whole series of nightmares that I'm sure every Exchange Server administrator has had" - Andrew McNair, Wintel Infrastructure Manager, Cell C

"By using the compliance features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, we can save about $400,000 in hardware and software costs. That's a big savings." - Joseph Nguyen, Systems Architect at a large U.S. university.

"With Exchange Server 2010, we can set up transport protection rules for things like social security numbers to comply with HIPAA and for voice mails to ensure that they can't be forwarded outside the company." - Thomas Dechmann, Senior Principal IT Technologist, Medtronic

I'm also particularly proud of the work the team has done delivering Exchange as a server and a service. This has been an incredible engineering endeavor that no one else in the industry comes close to delivering. Today, we've successfully scaled Exchange 2010 to more than 15 million Outlook Live accounts around the world and, moving forward, to millions more with Exchange Online. Our promise to deliver a seamless Exchange experience on premises with the server, in the cloud as a service or a combination of the two truly gives customers choice and peace of mind.

You can see more customer results from the case studies published today, read about the launch in press coverage, hear from MBD President Stephen Elop in his TechEd Europe keynote launching Exchange 2010 and this evening at the Exchange Connections conference in Las Vegas in my keynote.

I know many of you are already underway with your Exchange 2010 deployments and many more will be starting today. The Exchange Server 2010 bits are available for download now. As always, keep the feedback coming. Listening to customers and partners is how the team has made Exchange the premier e-mail solution across the globe and that's the way we intend to keep it.

Thank you!

- Rajesh Jha