Datasheet
Ninety trillion. That is the estimated number of emails that
were sent in 2009. Staggering isn’t it? While many of those
emails were used to send jokes or argue sports, a large portion
of them were used in business and deemed vital for the success of an organization.
It is no wonder, then, that Exchange Server administrators and messaging professionals are
in high demand, and it is our goal, in this book, to get you comfortable with Exchange 2010.
This chapter’s aim is to bring you up to speed on the latest versions of the Exchange adminis-
trator tools as well as help you understand the important changes since—and even the smallest
improvements over—Exchange Server 2007.
Brief History of Exchange Servers
Exchange Server 2010 is a calendaring and email solution that runs on Windows Server,
and like Exchange Server 2007, it can also integrate with your phone system. This is the
seventh major release of the product, and the Exchange teams continue to make improve-
ments and add features with every version.
Exchange started out as an upgrade to Microsoft Mail in 1996. Over the next several
years, releases 5.0 and 5.5 introduced Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP),
which was a precursor to what would become Active Directory (AD) in Windows 2000.
To take advantage of AD in Windows 2000, Microsoft also included Exchange Server
2000, which was a robust platform that included chat and instant messaging (IM) services.
In 2003, another version of Exchange was released, aptly named Exchange Server 2003.
Features such as chat and IM were removed and they were marketed as separate services in
Live Communications Server. The release of Exchange Server 2007 continued the tradition
of adding more features and expanded the storage of this email server even more than its
predecessors. Let’s look briefly at some of the historical milestones:
1996 Exchange 4.0
Client/server architecture
X.400 based
1997 Exchange 5.0 and 5.5
Clustering introduced
LDAP introduced
624432c01.indd 4 9/28/10 9:35:27 AM