SYSK 40: Beyond E-Mail – E12 promises to be one of the most impressive upgrades to Exchange that Microsoft has ever released

With proliferation of speech recognition and speech synthesis, you’d expect e-mail, voice mail and fax, and, of course, anti-virus and anti-spam technologies to be part of the next version.  But E12 is much more than that!

Here are just some of the features:
-   “Unified Messaging” = e-mail, fax, voicemail in one inbox
-   Scheduling assistant – helps you find good/better/best time slots for appointments
-   External OOF (out-of-office) auto-reply…of course schedulable
-   Outlook voice access – ability to call in using any phone and get your appointments, e-mails, even reschedule an appointment!
-   OWA (outlook web access) has move Outlook-like features, e.g. as you type the address, the best-guess choice is auto-filled based on the most recently used addresses, access to SharePoint resources, access to Outlook forms, DRM (digital rights management), etc.
-   Resources (e.g. conference room) is now easily distinguished from attendees
-   Multi-mailbox search
-   Outlook Mobile for cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices
-   64-bit, which promises to be faster and more stable
-   More secure, e.g. intra-org mail (E12 to E12) encrypted and signed by default, anti-virus and anti-spam protection
-   No more nightly backups – continuous (throughout the day) database backup
-   New server role-based setup => easier setup
-   Web services API
-   Easier client setup with auto-discovery services
and much more!