Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 review

Some of the core message filtering has been improved too. Microsoft has put in place a full anti-spam engine that works at the server level. Plus, there's a new version of the anti-virus engine, allowing third parties to integrate their products into the storage as well. I'd certainly look to evaluate both of these capabilities for an ES2K3 deployment - dealing with spam, viruses and other inappropriate content is a major business problem, but the technology facilities are in place in ES2K3 to have a good response to that problem.

The management tools for ES2K3 have also been nicely tweaked. It's much easier to schedule a batch move of a number of mailboxes from one server to another, for example. The process can also be set to time out if it's taking too long, thus allowing you to have a number of bites at the migration cherry over several nights of quiet periods, for instance.

Coming to a conclusion about ES2K3 isn't hard. If you have ES2K in place, ES2K3 provides new capabilities and functions but still happily interoperates. Whether it's worth upgrading will depend on your licensing model and the capabilities you wish to exploit. If your company signed up to the two-year rolling upgrade licensing package, deploying ES2K3 is going to be a no-cost issue, in which case you might as well push out some of the capabilities to select groups of users - for example, the new mobile capabilities. If you bought into fixed licensing for ES2K together with the Client Access Licences, it's somewhat more expensive to upgrade so you need a solid business case to make the move. For mobile workforces, the ability to get great access even on small devices like PDAs might well be the killer business reason for you to do the upgrade. Or you may be looking at consolidating a lot of storage into a SAN and thus looking at the Volume Shadow Copy capabilities of ES2K3/W2K3. Again, this functionality alone might well be compelling enough to make you upgrade.

If you're on ES5.5 on NT 4 Server, I think you ought to bite the bullet and move off that platform now. It has given you great service, but getting NT 4 driver support for new hardware is becoming increasingly difficult. I'd do the migration straight to WS2K3/ES2K3, with the clear intention of running it until its primary support runs out in five years. Looked at in that way, replacing the servers, OS and ES with new products today is a good investment for the next five years. As a product, it's a mature, stable and highly effective platform. Indeed, for many, it's the business backbone they rely on. ES2K3 builds on that and is definitely worth considering. The next release, however, is going to be something else entirely...

Author: Jon Honeyball