So Exchange 2010 was released for worldwide consumption, and was seen for the first time yesterday, or was it?

Actually no. Due to the partners and customers who have spent months and even years working with Microsoft, a number of people have been benefitting from Exchange 2010 for a while now already, albeit in various beta stages. The MVP community have been working with Microsoft for several years, finding bugs, suggesting improvements and being involved in whatever way we can to help make a good product better.

Early adopter customers who put their data and operations at risk to help the product mature and iron out significant bugs, kinks and usability issues have sweated along side the development and support teams to make sure that the product you and I get is much better than it could have been if it had only been “dog fooded” by MS IT.

Today's Exchange team blog post hints at some of the effort that the early adopters have gone through, but suffice it to say that since these guys (customers, not Microsoft IT or other staff) are willing to be quoted publicly on the benefits which they are receiving on a product before it went public, the end product can’t be half bad. In fact, marketing aside, lending you name to a product should mean you’re quite convinced about its effectiveness.

There’s going to be a ton of marketing coming out, but marketing aside Exchange 2010 is so far the best version of Exchange I’ve seen. The storage improvements alone are staggering, and while some of the improvements may take a while to grasp and even be frustrating to understand at first, I really believe that we’ve taken a major step forward and received a stunning contribution to the worlds richest mail experience.

20 million lines of code, near bullet proof availability, discovery, RMS, push mail, Outlook Voice Access and more and more, certainly beats the PANTS off POP3/IMAP and SMTP 😉

But that’s just my opinion 😛

Nic