Messaging Delivery Options: Microsoft Exchange
Judging by the sheer volume of users who are either in the process of migrating to Exchange or planning to do so, it's no surprise that Microsoft is stressing its coexistence and migration strategies. To draw users to its messaging environment, Microsoft offers connectors to many of the most common messaging systems, including X.400, Notes, cc:Mail, MS Mail, PROFS and SNADS; it also offers migration tools from the same platforms, plus tools for Novell GroupWise, Netscape Collabra and Unix sendmail. Taking a specific jab at Lotus, Microsoft's recently released Exchange Server Service Pack 1 includes an improved Notes migration toolkit, while work from the recently acquired Mesa Group focuses specifically on Notes and cc:Mail coexistence and migration.

Microsoft has clearly set its sights on capturing market share from Lotus Notes, its main rival in the groupware space. Its strategy appears to be domination through integration. As a convenient bridge between the BackOffice and Office application suites, Exchange leverages Windows NT infrastructures on the back end as well as the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite on the desktop. This means that through OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), many custom Exchange applications can leverage desktop applications for document processing and user interface work, rather than custom-coding these features in a separate messaging client. In the near future, companies betting the farm on NT 5.0's promise of enterprise directory services will have little choice but to select Exchange Server (and the rest of the BackOffice gang).

Like Lotus, Microsoft heavily emphasizes Internet standards in its latest Exchange product. Exchange Server 5.5 offers IMAPv4, POP3, LDAP and SMTP/MIME support (through its Internet Mail connector). Other improvements in the Internet space include "spam"-protection features, including message turfing (domain blocking) and relay protection. The new Outlook98 client also will embrace S/MIME (Secure MIME) as a message encryption/signature protocol, leveraging a X.509v3 PKI on the server side. Service Pack 1 replaces Exchange's internal PKI with the NT-based Microsoft Certificate Server.

Overall, the Exchange server environment is unlikely to change significantly until after the arrival of Windows NT 5.0 next year (we hope). However, Exchange has outgrown its NT 4.0 foundation, and crucially needs NT 5.0's enterprise directory services. According to Microsoft, the next major Exchange revision (code-named "Platinum") will leverage NT 5.0's Active Directory, but no release date had been announced at press time.

In the interim, Exchange offers better support for collaborative applications and Web access through improved APIs and a greatly expanded Outlook Web Access. On the API side, Microsoft exposes not only native Collaborative Data Objects, but also Exchange Routing Objects, which allow developers to access message routing functions through a scripting interface. This is meant to help the developers create more effective workflow applications.

For roaming users, Service Pack 1 adds an HTML forms converter to help migrate native Outlook forms to HTML code for Web clients. However, according to Microsoft, Exchange scripts don't translate directly to active server pages, so some recoding work (with suggestions from the forms converter) will be necessary.