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Microsoft formally unveiled Exchange Server 2000 on Monday for about 6000 people at its Microsoft Exchange Conference in Dallas by proudly boasting of how the software giant has eaten its own dog food.

Pitching Exchange 2000 as a messaging and collaboration infrastructure that will take supreme advantage of the Web, Gord Mangione, vice president of Exchange development, said Microsoft could have rolled out Exchange 2000 as early as June but decided to roll it out within the company first, to ensure that it was enterprise-ready.

During the conference's opening session, Mangione and Dave Walsh, from Microsoft's Internal Technology Group--who appeared via video linkup from the Redmond, Washington, campus--described the task. It went smoothly, Walsh said, especially for a company that traffics 4 million messages per day.

Walsh said Microsoft's IT department was able to double mailbox capacity, keep availability at 99.5 percent globally, and--in Redmond--consolidate 35 Exchange servers down to eight, with about 3000 users per server.

"You don't have to send out a search party to find our mail servers," Walsh said. "There is one rack, one storage area network, humming away 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

More Tools to Come Later

In addition to the release of Exchange 2000 and Exchange Conferencing Server, Microsoft released in beta form its document management server, code-named Tahoe. Russ Stockdale, vice president of the company's Knowledge Worker Solutions Group, described Tahoe as an "information portal." Tahoe will allow users to search multiple repositories for disparate types of data files, better manage documents, and serve as a collaborative applications platform, he said.

Microsoft also unveiled Office Designer, a tool that will ship with the next version of the Office productivity suite--now referred to as Office 10. The tool will let developers leverage Exchange 2000's Web Storage System to build and deploy collaborative applications.

Microsoft hopes to release both Tahoe and Office 10 in the first half of 2001.

For application service providers, Microsoft announced the Exchange 2000 Hosting Pack, a set of services that enhance the manageability of hosted Exchange servers. The services will automate the process of registering users and provide ASP customers with self-service provisioning and management capabilities via the Web, manage system resources and automatically allocate them to customers and users, enforce security to prevent users from improperly accessing resources, and log service provisioning for billing purposes.

Stressing Microsoft's .Net direction, Stockdale and Mangione oversaw several product demonstrations that stressed mobile and wireless use. The company recently announced technology aimed at the mobile market, including Mobile Information 2001 Server and mobile capabilities in Outlook, Mobile Access, and Mobile Manager.

"We want you to bake the Web into everything you do with Exchange," Mangione said.

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