E14 called and it wants its mailbox back, No More Bad Star Trek movie

by Christopher Kusek (PKGuild) Baltimization, Blog, Christopher Kusek, Exchange, Microsoft

The time is finally here! With Exchange 2010 on the horizon (Oh, and that I’m back from being out for three weeks… ) the time is finally here to finally be able to begin re-embracing Exchange

Incase you missed it, I’m a hardcore Exchange guy.  I first got into Exchange as a means to do certain functions which the mail systems at the time were unable to support, so I adopted the Exchange model in the Exchange 4.0 Timeframe (Oh, and MSMail but I won’t go there ;))

And for everyone who was ever involved in Exchange, you’ll know that like Star Trek Movies, there are good movies “Wow, that was amazing!” and there are bad ones “Wtf?! That was terrible! Oh, it’ must be an odd/even thing!”    We all experienced that with Windows versions too.  NT3.1 rocked, 3.5 sucked, 3.51 was decent, 4.0 was great, and in the Desktop Space.. Win95 was ‘eh’ win98 great, winME, WTF?! (And albeit I personally liked Vista, enough people seemed to have enough issues that it didn’t make it too technically feasible)

Well, these same rules did apply in star trek movie terms to Exchange (Yes, my very own beloved Exchange) whereby Exchange 4.0 was great (first…?) 5.0 was horrible.  5.5 was SOLID! Exchange 2000 was a nice intro, but Exchange 2003 was immaculate (for its needs) and Exchange 2007.  Well, lets just say, you’ll notice I haven’t talked about Exchange 2007 for the most part in the past 6 years.. Ever wonder if there was a reason for that?

So, it brings me great honor to say Exchange 2010 (E14) is going to be the rock which we all know it to be.    So like you, I will look forward to all the great solid things, like a management interface, configuration management.. things not being done as a SEVERE afterthought.  Pretty solid usability (Oh, and at no point have I ever disagreed with the UI/UX Experience, so my good friends in E2K7 UI/UX, none of this is a knock against you, you just had to ride the bad movie train ;))

Look out.. this blog may start to cover more Exchange related things again, considering most of my most frequently visited hits tend to be around messaging, an area I was forced out of by a terrible movie ;)