Exchange Server 2010 reaches release candidate

The release candidate of the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 was announced at the beginning of the week. According to Exchange product manager Michael Atalla, it is now feature complete. This means that Microsoft will only be working on bug fixes from now on until Exchange Server 2010 is made commercially available.

According to the blog post announcing its availability, Exchange Server 2010 supports Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and will co-exist with Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2003. Under the hood, the capabilities of Outlook Web Access have been substantially beefed-up, as with the addition of new unified messaging features.

What struck me was Microsoft's pragmatic approach to the advent of cloud computing, adding support to work in tandem with an outsourced or hosted solution provider. Additional details of the new features can be found here.

With its ability to do an in-place upgrade to the release version of Exchange Server 2010, now would be as good a time as any to plan for, or even test deploy this next iteration of Exchange. In the meantime, you can download it for free from Microsoft TechNet here.

For more on this story:
- check out this blog at The Microsoft Exchange Team Blog
- check out this article at InformationWeek

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