Features and benefits
Here's a summary of the key benefits and new features according to Microsoft:
- Lower costs and more flexibility
- Email archiving to assist compliance with new e-discovery laws
- New features designed to improve productivity, including:
- MailTips - Warnings about potentially grave errors like sending emails to large distribution groups
- Voice Mail Preview - Text previews of voice mail in Outlook
- Ignore Conversation - The ability to remove yourself from ‘reply all' threads if you want
- Conversation View - Combine related e-mail messages in a single conversation
- Consistent Experience - Same interface for Outlook on the PC, mobile phone or browser
Future components of this new generation of productivity software will include: Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010. Again Microsoft intends to create a consistent experience across devices and facilitate remote collaboration.
"With the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products, people will be more productive across the PC, phone and browser, IT professionals can choose to deploy and manage servers on-premises or from the cloud, and developers get more opportunities to build innovative solutions and grow their business," said Chris Capossela, senior VP of the information worker product management group at Microsoft.
The full version of Exchange Server 2010 will be available in the second half of this year. The other 2010 products mentioned are expected to start their technical preview in Q3 of this year and be released to manufacturing in the first half of 2010.
