The initial signs for this year’s Tech-Ed Europe - Microsoft’s annual get-together for its product gurus, partners and IT professionals – being the sort of show rich with standing ovations are not good.

Microsoft is in Berlin around the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, just after U2 has smeared the town with its dubious neo-political imprimatur, and just before Thanksgiving in the US – it’s one of those periods that might well be marked by suggestions in emails as “a good time to bury some bad news”. But: there’s some good stuff here. Calm stuff; stuff which shows MS is getting down to business, and not distracting the world with dancing paperclips.

The basic raw headlines are that Exchange 2010 goes to public availability as from today, worldwide: and Microsoft is very pleased with some rational improvements.

The bosses say that Exchange 2010 saves you money, especially by increasing the performance of a given server in using good old fashioned Direct Attached Storage, which makes implementation of Exchange 2010 (on Server 2008 R2) 40-60% cheaper.

The technicians back that up by saying that they have achieved a tenfold performance increase in disk I/O within Exchange – which is just as well, given that 10GB mailboxes per user are not out of the question in the new release. Dull, you say – but kind of cool: effort being put in where people want to see it.

The other headline concerns using BranchCache – a feature of Server 2008 R2 which permits the localised proxy-caching of lots of information that otherwise, you’d have to go back to the web or your corporate intranet, every time you want to read it.

It’s very early days to say whether this actually delivers benefit once it’s struck full-on by the worst the web developers can think up – but never mind that. Microsoft says that this is a very useful technology when dealing with countries that charge for international bandwidth consumption, right down to the end user – a horrifying prospect for many online addicts and one which the progressive destruction of monopoly telephony providers can only be bringing closer for lots of us.

Look at the trend here, and the courage (not a word I particularly intended to use about Microsoft when I got up this morning): BranchCache flies in the face of all the brouhaha about Cloud computing. Yes, says MS in its response to my question: by all means keep your definitive copy in the Cloud – but use BranchCache to minimise expensive web traffic. One wonders whether it has heard from the ISP and backbone carrier community, a few months before the rest of us find out what’s going on…

The trend comes back again with the “Exchange loves DAS” concept. This has been the year in which everyone’s been sniffing around indirectly connected storage – not quite with the same panacea attitude that has accompanied the wishful thinking around cloud services, but even so, the idea that iSCSI will deliver infinite terabytes at infinite speed has seriously come home to roost in many cases: serious storage is still about FibreChannel.

Microsoft has looked at that whole world (which, it freely agrees, the company doesn’t have a big presence in) and given a reassuring pat on the back to the guys who don’t want to break through from old-school server implementations when it comes to their email.