Almost two months after its release, IT directors are
taking a cautious approach to Microsoft’s Exchange 2007 e-mail
server, with only a handful of organisations using the
platform.
Maurene Caplan Grey of Grey Consulting said that investments in
Exchange 2000 and 2003 meant that most companies were in no hurry
to upgrade. Figures from analyst firm Gartner suggest that only
half of enterprises upgraded from Exchange 2000 to the now
superseded Exchange 2003.
Owen Williams, group head of IT at property firm
Knight Frank, told Computer Weekly that he had
no immediate plans to upgrade his organisation from Exchange 2003,
which he has only been running for two years.
Oliver Boardman, infrastructure manager at
Fullers, said
the brewer had updated its Exchange 2003 Server to Service Pack 2
nine months ago and would not be migrating any time soon.
However, Sejal Shah, ICT strategist at
LA Fitness,
said the fitness chain would probably upgrade to Exchange 2007
later this year, moving straight from Exchange 2000. “We will look
to upgrade once any bugs have been fixed,” he said.
Microsoft said it was confident there would be a strong market
for Exchange 2007 because of its unified messaging capability,
which it said requires less integration work than earlier releases
to give users a single inbox for voice, fax and
e-mail messages.
Mark Deakin, unified communications product manager at
Microsoft, said, “We will be talking to those Exchange 2000 and
2003 users who have a need for unified communications to explore
upgrade possibilities.”
Currently, that looks to be a relatively limited market. Phil
Sayer, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that for
enterprises to deploy unified communications, they would first have
to implement IP telephony.
Forrester found that only about 15% of European firms were using
unified communications systems, with another 13% in the process of
deploying them.
Gartner research vice-president Matt Cain said users would only
be able to deploy Microsoft’s unified messaging technology if they
paid for the new enterprise client access licence. He also warned
that the system requirements for Exchange 2007 meant that it needed
to be installed on 64-bit servers.
“This is more substantial than the average upgrade and will
require more up-front planning,” said Cain.
Related article:
Exchange enhanced
for 64-bit
Related article:
The route to painless migration
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