Frequently Asked Questions about Exchange Server 2007

Exchange Server 2007 is the next version of Exchange Server, the industry's leading server for e-mail, calendaring, and unified messaging. The release of Exchange Server 2007 is closely aligned with the Microsoft Office 2007 wave of products, which together deliver a best-in-class enterprise messaging and collaboration solution.

Exchange Server 2007 provides built-in protection technologies to help keep the e-mail system up and running and insulated from outside threats while allowing employees to work virtually anywhere, using clients such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and mobile devices. Exchange Server 2007 makes it easier for IT administrators to deliver these new capabilities to their organizations in a manageable and cost-effective manner. To learn more, read the product overview and explore the new features and enhancements.

Outlook 2007 provides the most complete e-mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks functionality available in an Exchange-compatible client. When used with Exchange Server 2007, Outlook 2007 users benefit from new features such as the Scheduling Assistant, which automates time-consuming meeting and resource scheduling, to Managed Folders, which serve to facilitate compliance with internal and regulatory policies. To learn more about how Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook 2007 work together, see Better Together: Do More with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. You can find more information about Outlook 2007 on the Office online site.

For specific hardware and software requirements please see System Requirements.

Exchange Server 2007 provides a localized experience in many languages. For details, review Supported Languages.

You can download Unified Messaging language packs on the Exchange Server TechCenter.

You can find detailed information on PBX support and Unified Messaging on the Exchange Server TechCenter.

Yes, the evaluation software is available now. To get the software and learn more about the evaluation program, see Exchange Server 2007 Evaluation Software.

Yes, Exchange Server 2007 will be an integral part of the "Longhorn" (code name for the next Windows release) version of Small Business Server (SBS). SBS is expected to be released six to twelve months following the release of the "Longhorn" version of Microsoft Windows Server.

Visit the How to Buy section for more information on pricing and licensing, including Frequently Asked Questions about licensing.

When upgrading to Exchange Server 2007, you cannot perform an in-place server upgrade on an existing Exchange server. Instead, you must install a new Exchange Server 2007 system into the existing organization, and then move the required data to the new server. Exchange Server 2007 will also support mixed environments that include Exchange 2000 Server and/or Exchange Server 2003, allowing for an easier and more gradual transition. You can find more detailed information about upgrading in the product documentation on the Exchange Server TechCenter, including the upgrade path from Exchange Server 5.5.

Public Folders are included and supported in Exchange Server 2007. Microsoft has communicated that future releases of Exchange Server may not include public folders. If you use Public Folders, read the Exchange Team Blog on the topic of public folders for more guidance.

Exchange has been operating within the same 32-bit architecture for the past 10 years, since Exchange 4.0. The messaging environment has evolved over time into a mission-critical application for most businesses today, and demands placed on messaging systems will continue to grow. We witness this growth through the increase of e-mail traffic and larger attachments that now require larger mailboxes to store these messages. Users are also accessing their e-mail in more ways, such as with mobile devices, through Web browsers using Outlook Web Access, and other applications, including Microsoft Office Communicator, MSN desktop search, and Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications.

Trends indicate that demands on messaging systems will continue to grow and 64-bit servers provide the system architecture to meet these demands while reducing costs within organizations through server and disk storage consolidations. With a larger addressable space, the Exchange servers can utilize more memory thereby reducing the required input/output per user (IOPS), enabling the use of larger disks as well as low cost storage such as SATA2 drives. Testing at Microsoft has shown an IOPS decrease of approximately 70 percent with Exchange Server 2007 on 64-bit hardware. Early customer deployments have been able to directly translate this into an increased utilization of current drives in their storage area networks (SAN) as well as new direct attached storage (DAS) topologies, thus significantly reducing their storage costs, which make up roughly 80 percent of hardware capital costs today.

Exchange Server 2007 is designed to be a stable, reliable enterprise messaging platform that delivers the fundamentals of e-mail and calendaring while providing innovative new capabilities. These new capabilities make the messaging system more cost effective and scalable for your organization and at the same time more productive for users accessing the system. Simply put, given the new capabilities of Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft could not guarantee a high-quality 32-bit version.

Exchange Server 2007 will support servers with x64 processors. Most new servers today ship with processors from Intel and AMD that include this x64 support, called Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T) by Intel and AMD64 by AMD. Exchange Server 2007 will not offer support for Itanium (IA-64) processors, which are intended for more processor-intensive database and business applications.

Exchange Server 2007 does require hardware and an operating system that are 64-bit. If you are running 64-bit hardware in your current messaging environment, you will not have to buy additional hardware. Note that Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2003 can be installed atop 32-bit versions of Windows Server 2000 or Windows Server 2003 on x64-based hardware, provided the hardware will work with 32-bit versions of Windows Server. For more information, read Exchange Server 2007 Processor and Memory Recommendations on the Exchange Server TechCenter.

Yes, to deploy Exchange Server 2007, you will need an x64 edition of Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2003 R2. Volume-licensing customers are free to exchange their 32-bit version of Windows for the 64-bit version at any time, using their media kits.

Exchange Server 2007 will not require 64-bit clients; 32-bit clients (such as Outlook) will be able to connect without issue to Exchange Server 2007 servers.

Most third-party 32-bit applications that work with Exchange Server 2003 will continue to function with Exchange Server 2007. Exceptions include applications that rely on 32-bit drivers that are not compatible with x64 systems and applications that call application programming interfaces (APIs) that are not included in Exchange Server 2007.