20 years ago in a galaxy far away
Did you know that today is 20 years since we declared RTM (Released to Manufacturing) of Exchange 4.0? Okay, so maybe this did not happen in the galaxy far away, but it sure feels like it! Here is a great overview of Exchange's earlier years (up to Exchange 2007). Exchange has been evolving for over 20 years now, and is still going strong! From our humble beginnings, adding SMTP protocol through an IMC connector as well as web access to email in Exchange 5.0 back in 1997 (that was some cutting edge stuff back then!), starting to play in service waters 10 years later in 2007 (ever heard of Exchange Labs?) all the way to where we are today with Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Online – we have gone through many a transformation. One thing is certain, though – we would not have been here without you, our customers. You keep pushing us to get better and bring you more features. When we do something wrong (yeah, that happens), the incredible Exchange community is always quick to let us know. And for those of you wishing that this virtual birthday celebration could somehow take place in person, you’ll want to sign up to attend Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta. Thank you for all the support and amazing ride! Anyone up for 20 more? (Hat tip, Tony.) The Exchange Team15 years!
Believe it or not – as of today, this blog has been around for 15 years! That’s right… the very First post was published on February 9, 2004, with How the M: Drive came about hot on its heels. Not too shabby for something people said would never work! On this blog, we have something about every version of Exchange since Exchange 5.5; we headed off to the cloud with Exchange Online and we came back to earth recently announcing Exchange Server 2019. We dove into history with posts like A brief history of time – Exchange Server way as well as explained The story of Squeaky Lobster. Oh, and we also covered a bunch of technical stuff too, from time to time. Have you ever wondered what the top 5 posts that people viewed on the blog have been (each of them with over 300,000 page views)? Well, here they are: Ask the Perf Guy: Sizing Exchange 2013 Deployments GAL Photos in Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 Outlook Connectivity with MAPI over HTTP Want more control over Sent Items when using shared mailboxes? Configure Automatic Replies for a user in Exchange 2010 And did you know that we have had over 40M page views for content on our blog? 40M! Truth is, we suspect this number to be higher but over the years, as blog home has changed, different platforms tracked this differently so it’s a bit of a mystery. Did you know that we had our blog officially translated into 10 languages for a few years (though sadly most of those are now gone (translated blog posts, not the languages))? All of this would not have been possible if it was not for people writing stuff for the blog. The process that we go through when posting has not changed very much over the years but it always starts with an idea and someone willing to write about it. They are not always the same person. We don’t have an exact number but we have had 300+ people contribute to the blog by authoring blog posts. We’ve had Support Engineers, engineering PMs and Devs, the Marketing team, Consultants, Escalation Engineers and we probably missed about 10 more titles – all of whom have dedicated time to research and write stuff to share it with Exchange community. We also had many more people commenting and providing feedback, both from inside Microsoft and from our loyal readers and fans. Blogging was never really anyone’s job, so having ideas and finding people willing to write about them is what made this possible. We realize that over the years (because we are now old and wise, in a Santa Claus kind of way), the way people consume information (and where they do it) have changed, but as we still seem to have a good sized following, we plan to keep this thing going. As mentioned, over the years we have moved our blog between different platforms (the current platform is platform #4) and we are considering moving again, which will help us be more plugged into overall Microsoft blogging / community efforts. Don’t you worry, if we do something, we plan to bring our content with us and work on redirection of old URLs to their new home. But more on that later; let’s spend our time today celebrating the past, why care about the future, we say. For today, anyway! We have been doing a bit of cleanup, though. You might notice that bios (that we used to post for post authors) have been deleted. Honestly – over the years this stuff became so hopelessly out of date that it just needed to go. Trying to update someone’s bio from 10 years ago is just not all that interesting. Anyway – as we remember the past and muse about the future – we wanted to ask a few questions, hoping to get a bit more insight into how you would like us to continue with this blog of ours: Do you still find information in the form of a blog post something that you use? Why would you prefer something to be a blog post vs. let’s say a documentation article? Any other tips you have for us? The Exchange Team Blog Team
