See your voice mail: Microsoft's next Exchange Server will make speech visible

What may be no surprise to businesses that have already been paying close attention to Microsoft's expansion into the cloud, is that ES 2010 will be available in two forms -- both as conventional server software hosted by businesses on-premise, and as a communications service hosted by Microsoft.

"With [ES] 2010, we're really making a bet on Exchange Web Services," remarked White, "giving the IT pro remote access to manage [ES] and still have all the controls they want, but not have to manage the actual hosting of the service." Expect Office 2010 users to also have the ability to run something called Outlook Live, which will effectively be the client hosted in the cloud as well -- not OWA, which is pushed through the server, but a full-featured e-mail client pushed to the client.

"We do expect the vast majority of our customers to be in a hybrid environment," she added, "where they have some of their organization hosted, some of their organization on-premise based on user profiles, or their own internal policies and requirements. So across this wave, we've thought about it as a hybrid world out there, and built best-in-class capabilities for that."
Both the server and service editions will be administered by the customer, however, through a communications platform that the company will be marketing more prominently as a development platform. Exchange, the language?

"For Exchange, we do support PowerShell 2 and Remote PowerShell," Microsoft's Julia White told Betanews, confirming that PowerShell's next edition -- with its own built-in developer tools -- will be the foundation for ES 2010. But Microsoft also plans to market Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 -- all with the same release timeframe, we're told -- as a collaborative platform, tentatively being called the "Office wave all-up."

"So you'll see a lot of focus around helping our developer community and our ISV community really fully leverage Exchange Web services." Expect, for example, online documentation with tutorial videos to become available, some as soon as today, with live support provided through the company's MVP partners in threaded conversations. (Threaded through OWA? That would be interesting to see.)

The payoff that Exchange users should expect to see on their client medium of choice, White predicted, is fewer e-mails -- more organization, more relevance, and less clutter. That will be the company's productivity pitch going forward.

"Most business users have about a hundred e-mails a day. And if you're me, you have about three times that," she remarked. "But really it's only about ten to twelve conversations going on at any one time. So by grouping these in a really logical order...you basically cut your inbox from 100 down to 10 very quickly. Around the team, we say, 'What do you want to do with your hour back?' And we're actually not kidding. Between voice mail triage, having robust experience on OWA and the mobile phone, we're getting 30 to 60 minutes back in our day, which is a great cost savings. And now we can do something else."

Once again, Microsoft's product managers come up with a better advertising pitch than its agencies.