Exclusive Titanium Sneak Preview

[Makki]

Next summer, in addition to introducing a new version of Office, its popular suite of client-side business applications, Microsoft will ship an update to Exchange, the email server that feeds Outlook, Office's email client. This past Friday, Exchange product manager Edward Wu stopped by PC Magazine's offices to discuss the product, currently code named Titanium.

"We feel that this is the most significant Exchange release since Exchange 2000," he said. "In the way it works with Outlook, it provides better mobility to end users. It includes significant enhancements on the administration side, making the life of the administrator a heck of a lot easier in terms of both deployment and management. And we do some high-level things for developers as well."

The interplay between Outlook and Exchange has, according to Microsoft officials, been improved in several respects. First off, Microsoft has significantly enhanced the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) that shuttles data between the two applications. The MAPI protocol used by Exchange 2000 and the current Outlook client worked well over a local area network, but it dragged a bit when used over dial up connections or low speed wireless networks. "There was a lot redundancy," said Wu. "The protocol had to make so many round trips between client and server to get anything done." In his estimation, the new MAPI protocol used by Titanium and Outlook 11, part of the new Office 11, needs five times fewer trips across the network to complete each communication. Plus, Wu says the software is better at compressing the data being sent. It can compress a Word attachment, for instance, by as much as 70 percent.

At the same time, Wu and his team have improved the synchronization process, when Outlook users, after reading and composing email offline, connect to Exchange and conflate server- and client-side data. Today, when you're synchronizing over a dial-up line and you suddenly lose your connection, you have to start the synchronization from scratch when you reconnect. With Titanium and Outlook 11, Microsoft says you'll simply be able to pick up from the point you left off. And if particular piece of data isn't synchronizing properly, the software won't hold up the entire synchronization process. It can, says Microsoft's Wu, skip the item and move on to the rest of the job.

But, when it comes to improvements Microsoft has made to the way Outlook and Exchange interact, we're most intrigued with Microsoft's introduction of a new cache mode. When using Outlook today, you're either connected to the Exchange server or your not. You're online or you're offline. With the new cache mode, Wu says you can continue to use at the same pace, sending and reading messages, as the device goes in and out of, say, wireless network coverage. If you try to send an email, for instance, and you're not online, the client won't launch an error message telling you that your connection is lost and refuse to send the message. It will accept your request, and in the background, as you continue to work, it keeps on the look out for a network connection and sends the message when it's able to. "You don't know when you've lost a connection," explains Wu.

Microsoft has also revamped the way Exchange interacts with clients other that Outlook. Most notably, the company has beefed up Outlook Web Access, which Wu likes to call "owa." When accessing Titanium over the Internet, through a Web browser, not via the standard Outlook client and MAPI, you can now choose between two modes: rich mode, for use over a fast connection, and a basic mode, for use over dial-up. The rich-mode looks very similar to the standard Outlook MAPI client and includes most of the same tools, including a spell check, a calendar, and the ability to use Secure MIME encryption and digital signatures. Plus, Wu says that Titanium can, without the help of add-on software, serve up data to handheld devices and cell phones equipped with microbrowsers.

Yet, as much as Titanium will please email users, it may please administrators even more. Whereas Exchange 2000 could handle roughly 3,500 users per server, Titanium can reportedly accommodate about 5,000 users from each server. The University of Oregon, for instance, can handle 5,000 users on the initial beta version of Titanium. Another beta user, a bank in Argentina, can handle 10,000, but Wu admits that this "an unusual case." Currently, Microsoft's email system is spread across 117 data centers worldwide. When they switch over to Titanium, Wu expects that number to drop to 19.

Furthermore, a host of new management tools have been rolled into Titanium, and it will be accompanied by a new "management pack" that Microsoft believes will make it easier for administrators to monitor and manage the Exchange from afar.

This is just a partial list of features. And, before it's finally released next summer, the server is sure to undergo a few changes. At this point, Microsoft has only release a beta 1 version of the product, testing it with the help of only about 50 businesses across the world. The public beta version, known as beta 2, will be available beginning January 6. Stay tuned to Neowin.net for reviews of beta 2 and, eventually, the final product.

PC-MAG

[Makki]

Bump!!!

This should be on front page mods