Introducing Exchange Server 2010™

Now, more than ever, your organization requires cost-effective and flexible communication tools. With Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 you can achieve new levels of reliability and performance with features that simplify your administration, help protect your communications, and delight your users by meeting their demands for greater mobility.

Microsoft Exchange Server, the cornerstone of Microsoft’s Unified Communications solution, is a flexible and reliable messaging platform that can help you lower your messaging costs by 50-80%, increase productivity with anywhere access to business communications, and safeguard your business with protection and compliance capabilities that help you manage risk.

Lower IT costs with a flexible and reliable platform

Pressure to optimize your IT infrastructure for ever-changing business conditions requires you to be agile, so investing in solutions that provide reliability and choice is critical. Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment to your unique needs and provides a simplified way to help keep e-mail continuously available for your users.

This flexibility and simplified availability comes from innovations to the core platform that Exchange is built on. These innovations deliver numerous advances in performance, scalability, and reliability advancements, while lowering the total cost of ownership 50-80%.

A new, unified approach to high availability and disaster recovery helps achieve new levels of reliability as it reduces the complexity and cost of delivering business continuity up to 80%. With new features, such as Database Availability Groups and online mailbox moves, you can more easily and confidently implement mailbox resiliency with database-level replication and failover, all with familiar Exchange management tools.

• Greater choice of storage hardware options, allows you to tailor your Exchange infrastructure to your organization’s specific business or technology needs while lowering the overall storage costs 50-70%. Storage options range from support for traditional Storage Area Networks (SAN) to low-cost, desktop class Direct Attached Storage (DAS). Larger mailbox size ensures that employees can access the information they need to do their jobs in a quick and efficient manner, without spending time deleting messages and managing their inbox to stay under the imposed limit.
  Learn more about mailbox resiliency.
• Administrative advances in Exchange 2010 can help you save time and lower operational costs 15-20% by reducing the burden on your IT staff. A new role-based security model, self-service capabilities, and the Web-based Exchange Control Panel, allow you to delegate common or specialized tasks to your users without providing them full administrative rights or increasing help desk call volume.
  Learn more about management tools.

Delight users with anywhere access to communications

Your business success relies on technology solutions that make your users more productive. With Exchange Server 2010 you can cost effectively provide your users the freedom to securely access all of their communications - e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and more - from virtually any platform, Web-browser, or device to get more done wherever they are.

Your users live their business lives in their inboxes, but the ever-growing flow of information through those inboxes affects productivity and profitability.

With Exchange Server 2010 enhancements, your users can increase their productivity and more easily collaborate with each other and their business partners with these advanced features:

• Time-saving inbox management tools that help your users more easily organize and prioritize the communications they receive each day. Exchange 2010 includes an enhanced conversation view that automatically arranges messages into threads, regardless of their location in the inbox, and MailTips that inform users about details that could result in unnecessary or undeliverable e-mail messages, before they click send. New integrated support for instant messaging (powered by Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2) and SMS text messaging in Outlook Web App means your users can have a range of communication tools at their disposal, anywhere they can log into the Web client.
  Learn more about Outlook Web App.
• A transformed voicemail experience with Exchange-powered voice mail enhancements like speech-to-text previews of received voice messages, and the flexibility for your users to create customized voice mail menus and call handling rules to ensure callers are given the right priority. Replace your legacy systems with the enhanced capabilities of Exchange voice mail and reduce your voice mail costs by 50%.
  Learn more about voicemail with Unified Messaging.
• The best three-screen user experience available through Outlook on the desktop, Outlook Web App in the Web browser, and Exchange ActiveSync, the de facto industry standard for mobile devices. With the built in capabilities of Exchange Active Synch, you can reduce costs for secure mobile messaging while supporting users on virtually any smart phone, including iPhones, Windows Mobile or Blackberry.
  Learn more about mobility.

Manage risk with protection and compliance capabilities

A growing number of applications and devices access your e-mail infrastructure, so it is more important than ever that you consider the protection of your mission critical e-mail data when you choose an e-mail solution. Your organization has many reasons to protect and archive e-mail, from regulatory concerns to internal organizational governance. Exchange 2010 delivers integrated information protection, control, and compliance tools focused on helping you simplify and automate this process:

• New integrated, out-of-the-box e-mail archiving gives you tools to preserve e-mail data without changing the experience for your users or IT staff. Combined with the flexibility provided by the Exchange storage architecture, you can take control of your corporate e-mail data with a personal archive that seamlessly surfaces in both Outlook and Outlook Web App.
• A new retention policy framework allows your IT staff to define, deploy, and automate the expiry and archiving of e-mail data. In addition to default policies set by your IT staff, your users can select and apply retention policies to individual messages or folders. And Exchange 2010 adds a new legal hold policy that retains and places on hold any edits or deletions of e-mail data that users make. A simplified e-Discovery process with a new Web-based multi-mailbox search feature. This easy-to-use capability can be delegated to specialist users, like a compliance officer, without providing the users full administrative privileges.
  Learn more about archiving, retention, and discovery.
• New Transport Protection Rules help you safeguard sensitive business information. You can automatically apply Information Rights Management (IRM) policies to both e-mail and voice mail messages, after they have been sent, based on a range of message content criteria.
  Learn more about information protection and control.

Optimized for Software-plus-Services

Having been designed, developed, and tested with the Microsoft Software-plus-Services strategy at its core, Exchange 2010 offers you flexible deployment options. You can choose from on-premises deployment with Exchange 2010, a hosted service with Exchange Online or from one of many service provider partners, or a seamless mix of both. Microsoft is committed to the Software-plus-Services strategy, empowering you to choose when and how you take advantage of on-premises, hosted, cloud-based, and hybrid solutions without interrupting or changing the experience for your users

Top Reasons to Upgrade to Exchange Server 2010

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is designed to deliver increased protection for your business and give anywhere access for your employees, while being operationally efficient to deploy, manage and maintain. Should you upgrade? Here are the top reasons for you to consider:

• Reduced deployment cost
  Exchange Server 2010 helps you reduce costs by addressing common infrastructure requirements such as backup, e-mail archiving, mobile e-mail access, and voice mail with no need for third-party tools
• Simplified high availability and disaster recovery
  Exchange Server 2010 introduces a simplified approach to high availability and disaster recovery to help you achieve new levels of reliability and reduce the complexity of delivering business continuity.
• Easier administration and decreased dependence on the help desk
  Exchange Server 2010 provides new self-service capabilities to help users perform common tasks without calling the help desk.
• Greater mobility and flexible access
  Exchange Server 2010 offers an enhanced universal inbox experience, which provides your users with access to all of their business communications from a single location.
• Decreased inbox overload and increased productivity
  Exchange Server 2010 adds new productivity features which help your users organize and prioritize the communications in their inboxes efficiently.
• Transformed voice mail
  With Exchange Server 2010, users can receive their voice mail messages in their inbox with text preview.
• Simplified compliance
  Exchange Server 2010 delivers new integrated archiving functionality to help simplify compliance and discovery.

• Safeguards for sensitive information
  With centrally managed and enforced information protection and control capabilities, Exchange Server 2010 makes it easy to encrypt, control, and moderate your company's communications.
• Reduced risk of malware and spam
  Exchange Server 2010 actively helps protect your communications through built-in defenses against junk e-mail and support for an array of third party security products.

To run Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise Edition on x64 platforms, you need:

• PC - An x64 architecture-based computer with Intel processor that supports Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T) or AMD processor that supports the AMD64 platform; Intel Itanium family IA64 processors are not supported.
• Operating system - Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard and Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise Edition.
• Operating system for installing management tools - The 64-bit editions Microsoft Windows Vista or Microsoft Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008. Note: Requirements only for management tools installation.

Additional requirements to run Exchange Server 2010:

• Memory - Minimum of 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM per server plus 5 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended for each mailbox.
• Disk space -
  • At least 1.2 GB on the drive used for installation.
  • An additional 500 MB of available disk space for each Unified Messaging (UM) language pack that you plan to install.
  • 200 MB of available disk space on the system drive.
• Drive - DVD-ROM drive, local or network-accessible.
• File format - Disk partitions formatted as NTFS file systems.
• Monitor - Screen resolution 800x600 pixels or higher.

Detailed technical requirements

Actual requirements will vary based on system configuration and specific features installed. For more detailed system requirements, please visit the Exchange Server 2010 Technical Documentation Library.

Additional requirements

• Windows Server 2008 R2 requirements