Microsoft announces next Exchange upgrade, 'Titanium'

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer officially introduced the next version of Exchange, code-named Titanium, at the Fusion 2002 conference this morning in Anaheim, Calif.
Speaking at the conference, Ballmer called Titanium an "incremental upgrade to Exchange 2000," similar to the upgrade from Exchange 5.0 to 5.5 in 1997, Microsoft said in an announcement.
The next major architectural change, similar to what users found with Exchange 2000, is being developed as part of the Kodiak program at Microsoft, said Chris Baker, lead product manager for Exchange. That version won't be available for a few years, he said.
This release comes in response to customer requests for improvements to Exchange 2000, including an easier way to deploy the Active Directory necessary for Exchange 2000.
Other differences between the Titanium upgrade and its predecessor, Baker said, will be better integration between Exchange and other lines of business applications through XML, reliance upon the Session Initiation Protocol-based standard for instant messaging in the Windows Messenger client, and better deployment tools for wireless devices to connect with Exchange.
"We're encouraging people to do more integration of Exchange into other applications," Baker said.
The XML improvements will connect documents across different parts of a network, he said. For example, a calendar entry could be identified as an XML object and inserted into other applications such as enterprise resource planning software.
He declined to spell out in detail how that function will work, however, saying that more information will be finalized and released in the coming months. Some of the improvements include a new user interface, outlined three weeks ago by Microsoft (see story).

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