A brief history of time - Exchange Server way
Ever wondered how Exchange Server evolved over the years? And how come Exchange Server 2007 shows "8.0" as its version number? Here is a brief history of time... it might add a bit to the known history! First Exchange proof of concept was in the early 90's. Development team usage only. Mercury - we couldn't get Exchange to scale past 25 users. We were bleeding internally with Xenix mail, so we figured that we'd keep Exchange alive but just use it as a MIR (Microsoft Internal Release). A perf and scale team was put in-place to see what we could do about the abysmal performance. Touchdown - the perf and scale team figured out the important issues, and Exchange once again had the potential to become an external release, marketed and sold by Microsoft. Indeed, after several test releases, we shipped in early '96 as Exchange 4.0 4.1 - Exchange 4.0 spent a long time in development, but it was a little rough around the edges. We immediately started work on a 4.1. After having implemented X400 as the primary messaging protocol and an X500-like directory structure, we quickly realized that this Internet 'thing' was really going to take off. It started to become obvious that we needed more than a .1 release. The 4.1 moniker was dropped and we were now working toward 4.5. After implementing several ground-breaking protocols such as SMTP and LDAP v2, this was certainly not a dot release. We shipped as Exchange 5.0 in early '97. Exchange 5.0 brought another important technical addition - the introduction of a Web-based e-mail client called Exchange Web Access (EWA). EWA was subsequently renamed Outlook Web Access (OWA). EWA was revolutionary for its time. It allowed employees or other individuals with mail stored in an Exchange 5.0 or later server to use a web browser to access their e-mail from anywhere at any time. In other words, the Exchange server provided the necessary information and interface through the web browser, no special e-mail client application was required on the user's machine. While on the subject of Exchange 5.0: If you still have an Exchange 5.0 CD around, there is an Easter egg on the CD in the form of a file called EXGL32.DLL. Rename that file to .AVI and view it... it is essentially credits for all the people that worked on Exchange 5.0 and while at it, we made some fun about the versioning in it too. Just so you get an idea: The Exchange 4.1 Team! Oh... wait... The Exchange 4.5 Team! Uh... let's try this again... The Exchange 5.0 Team! Yeah, that'll work! Osmium (aka Oz) - More and more Internet protocol work was poured into the product including LDAP v3 and NNTP support. It was also obvious that 16GB of database space was not enough. Exchange 5.5 was born and shipped near the end of '97. Platinum (aka Pt) - After we shipped Exchange 5.5, we started building the Exchange 6.0 product. Big changes were afoot. The Exchange Directory team had moved over to Windows and Active Directory was coming together. Both the Windows and Office teams used year numbers for their releases, so externally, the product would be called '2000' rather than 6.0. There was no point changing the internal version numbers, so we stuck with 6.0 inside the code. Exchange 2000 was released in November of the year 2000. Mercury - Exchange 2000 also turned out to be a little rough around the edges, especially with upgrades and integration with Exchange 5.5. We had to act quickly, so SP1 quickly followed. However, more was needed, so we started work on a 6.1 which was codenamed 'Mercury'. Ironically, this was the same code name as what we had used back in the early 90's, and suffered the same fate as the first Mercury. For various business reasons, the Mercury project was canceled. We had already written a lot of new code, and this was eventually divided and shipped as part of Exchange 2000 SP2 + SP3, with the rest in Titanium. Titanium (Ti) - We were now working on Exchange 6.5, this was to sync up with Windows 2003 and Office 2003. Major technical breakthroughs occurred in this release including the advent of RPC/HTTP, cached mode and ActiveSync for mobile clients. Exchange 6.5 was externally shipped as Exchange 2003 (shipped in September of 2003). Kodiak - after Exchange 2003 shipped, it was time for a major shake-up of the product. We had many new ideas and needed a place to check-in our code - the version number is now 7.0. Spam is a major problem – is it time to create a special version of Exchange just to tackle this? The small business market is in need of a 'tiny' version of Exchange – perhaps the market is ripe for Exchange for Workgroups, or perhaps Exchange Express. For the enterprise product, is it time to switch from ESE (JET) to SQL? After a lot of research and investigation, we decided to cancel the Kodiak project, but take our best ideas forward. E12 - A new version of Exchange needs to come together. There's too much proof-of-concept code occupying the 7.0 version space. It's time to increment to 8.0. With major changes all round, including Unified Messaging, multiple server roles and PowerShell integration, the code name was aligned with the Office team. Office was working on their '12' wave, and so we used the code name of Exchange 12 (or E12). Exchange 8.0 / E12 was externally shipped as Exchange 2007 at the end of year 2006. E?? - We just shipped Exchange 2007 SP1 (or, E12 SP1 to you and me). What's next, you ask? Is it Exchange 9.0 or perhaps Exchange 13? Perhaps it's something completely different... Stay tuned! Paul Bowden15 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 TeamExchange Team blog got an upgrade!
We are excited to announce that Exchange Team blog got an upgrade! We wanted to enrich the experience of visiting our blog site, as well as wanted to improve the site design and add several features to the site. Firstly, you will notice that we are now hosted at the different URL, and our new home is at: http://msexchangeteam.com/ The new "main" RSS 2.0 feed link is: http://msexchangeteam.com/rss.aspx Then, you will notice that the whole site got a visual overhaul, hopefully it is more pleasing to view. Hope you like it! Few other things that are brand new: - The Videos section of the blog. Here we will be placing different videos that we will be recording occasionally - things like short interviews with members of Exchange product group, demos of something cool in Exchange and so on. Who knows, some Exchange party video might make it up there too! - The ability to add attachments to blog posts; no more posting of scripts in the body of the post (which can cause formatting and syntax issues later). All of the "old" links RSS links and feeds should keep on working (so the redirection is in place from old http://blogs.technet.com/exchange to new http://msexchangeteam.com/. We plan to keep this redirection in place for a good while, but just to make sure - you might want to update your RSS clients to point to the new URL so you can keep on getting your dose of Exchange-related goodness without any interruptions in the future! As always, feedback is welcome. Look out for more new features and improvements we are planning! - Exchange Team Blog crew
