Hosted Exchange allows you to offer comprehensive messaging services for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), small office/home office (SOHO) businesses, and individual consumers. Based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2, this messaging solution provides tools for flexible business modeling. You can offer a broad range of services that go from basic e-mail up to higher value services, such as providing additional storage, hosting personal domains, and calendars.

Exchange Server 2007 brings a rich set of new technologies, features, and services to this release of the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration solution. Exchange Server 2007 is designed to be a flexible messaging solution for customers of all sizes, and has been re-engineered to improve the administrative and management experience by using new server roles that align with how messaging systems are typically deployed and distributed across an organization.

Exchange Server 2007 is also designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook 2007, delivering an unprecedented level of functionality to SMBs, while reducing the system management requirements for service providers.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 introduces role-based deployment. This kind of deployment lets you deploy specific server roles that provide the messaging functionality you want for your organization. A server role is a unit that logically groups the required features and components that are required to perform a specific function in your messaging environment. Each server role includes:

Exchange Server 2007 supports the following five server roles:

Through the introduction of new server roles, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 setup and deployment has been re-engineered to improve the administrative experience. The reference architecture is designed to support a tiered approach to implementation of services, and to support those hosters entering the market with plans to grow their services offers on pace with the growth of their business.

The architecture targets three design points:

The solution design defines the number of servers required for each design point with a set of formulas to provide the tools service providers can use to grow their service from one design point to the next.

Previous releases of Exchange high availability solutions were based on shared-storage, but such solutions could be costly and complex. Not only has Exchange Server 2007 improved shared-storage functionality with single copy cluster (SCC), but it also introduces two new asynchronous replication-based configurations:

Exchange Server 2007 incorporates features specifically designed to help your business comply with corporate, regulatory, and legal requirements. These features enable you to apply retention rules, scan and act on messages in transport, flexibly journal, and perform rich text searches across mailboxes in your organization. Exchange Server 2007 eases the toll often placed on administrators charged with applying and enforcing compliance policies, while avoiding adverse impact on employees and their productivity.

Exchange Server 2007 includes many improvements to antivirus protection. In addition to continued support of the Virus Scanning API (VSAPI), Microsoft has made a significant investment in more effective, efficient, and programmable virus scanning at the transport level.

Exchange Server 2007 introduces the concept of transport agents. Agents are managed software components that perform a task in response to an application event. Agents act on transport events, much like event sinks did in earlier versions of Exchange.

Third-party developers can write customized agents to take advantage of the underlying Exchange MIME parsing engine for robust transport-level antivirus scanning. The Exchange Server 2007 MIME parsing engine, developed and evolved through many years of MIME-handling exposure, is an extremely robust MIME engine. Another antivirus improvement is the implementation of attachment filtering by a transport agent. By running attachment filtering on the Edge Transport server role, you can reduce the spread of malware attachments before they enter an organization.

The core Unified Messaging functionality available “out-of-the-box” in Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.0 is Outlook Voice Access (OVA). In a traditional environment, calling into a voicemail system means accessing only voicemail. With OVA, not only can you access your voicemail, but you can access your e-mail messages and calendar as well. OVA enables you to call and check your calendar, read and send e-mail, change schedules if you are delayed, or even send out notifications to cancel meetings if necessary.

This ability for customers to check their e-mail and calendar information from a phone is another key feature that service providers can use to differentiate themselves and to find additional revenue streams for premium services.

Exchange Server 2007 offers a significantly improved Outlook user experience on mobile devices. It also includes improved security and better mobile device management. When you combine the new Exchange features with the latest version of Microsoft Windows Mobile, you can increase performance and usability and help make your mobile device more secure.

Devices based on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 and the Messaging and Security Feature Pack can receive security policies that are pushed to them from Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 servers. These policies control how the device behaves and what data is available on the device. For example, devices can be forced to time out after a specified period of inactivity, at which point the user must enter a PIN to use the device. The administrator can specify the nature of the PIN, and has the option of remotely erasing a lost or stolen device the next time it connects to the wireless network.

The following table describes which features are available with different versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile.

Table: Windows Mobile Features