The Sirana Roadmap for Exchange: Part 2

Earlier I talked about the short term issues that Exchange should address, and promised to talk about the long term issues in this post.

Oops.

There's one more. First, you have to buy into one thing: at it's fundamental level, Exchange is about communication.  It's about 1:1 communication, as well as one to many.  Today, we do that by email.  But if other forms of communication augment email in the future, should Exchange stay stuck in the past, with email only?

No.

Let's look at one example.  Today, many many people are sharing their ideas and views through blogs. Where 5 years ago people like Joe Spolsky would have started an email-based mail list, today they write with a blog.

For the author, writing a blog entry is no different than composing an email, or posting into a public folder.  Why wouldn't Exchange in some future version be the right platform for that? Why would customers have to deploy another server for communication?  Isn't that Exchange's job?

I wish I could take credit for the insight, but I have to thank Ed Brill, the Lotus pundit, who already uses a form of Domino as his blog platform.  He wrote about it in a comment to a blog post I made on the Ferris site, deploring the lack of blogging software for Windows.

OK, with that short diversion out of the way, let's go to the crystal ball and talk about the Long Term imperatives for Exchange.

Long Term

There once was a time when Microsoft said that Exchange was the answer for communication *AND* collaboration.  Then, since Exchange didn't get a lot of uptake for collaboration and new products like Sharepoint came out, it became the product for communication.  Other Microsoft products were the solution for collaboration.

Now, we have instant messaging, blogs, RSS clients, etc., which are all about communication, both one to one and one to many.  And Exchange doesn't play with any of them.  So we are left with "Exchange is the platform for communication.  Unless it's real-time communication, when you should get a different product. Or, unless you mean group communication and discussions, when this one works.  And if you want to communicate over a blog, sorry we can't help you.  Please look at Movable Type."

And believe me, this confusion would be even worse if I brought collaboration back into the picture.  Which I won't because I promised not to write too much on the topic of the long term.

Fundamentally, Microsoft's problem isn't that it has too many products.  It has too many brands.

Microsoft is a large company.  As a large company, it can and should offer a range of different solutions for customers.  You want email?  Check we have that.  You want instant messaging and real-time?  Gotcha right here. 

Great, sign me up.

Customers are happy to see that happen because they fundamentally like dealing with a smaller number of vendors and like solutions that work together, at least in theory.

But even a company the size of Microsoft can't support an infinite number of brands.

Today, in the area of communication (and collaboration) at Microsoft you have the Windows Server brand (which has basic email), you have the Exchange brand, you have the Sharepoint brand (both Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal), you have the Live Communications Server brand.  Am I leaving any out?

The trouble with having all of these brands is that it costs money to develop unique personas and messages (which is a problem for Microsoft) and it become difficult to sort out the technical strategy and vision, while delivering unique value (again Microsoft's problem, but ultimately it's a problem for you.)  Things get messy as individual development teams all fight for customer attention and incremental spending.  Messages get confusing.  Strategies are murky.

However, instead of this, you could just have the Exchange brand.  As part of the Exchange family, you could buy the Exchange Enterprise edition, which allows you to deploy all sorts of communication services for your company, partners and customers, including email, real-time, etc. 

Or if you were a smaller company, maybe you'd like to start with the Exchange Server Email Edition, which gives you an email platform you can start with. 

Later you can add other capabilities.  For example, you can deploy Exchange Document Services to give you some document management, authoring and publishing features.  Or, add real time communication services.

You may be saying to yourself, "Big deal.  You've renamed some products. What's the value in that?" 

Yes, that's part of it.  But quick, what's the brand at Microsoft for communication and collaboration?  You say Exchange?  Well, that's an improvement already, isn't it?

And the improvements don't stop there.  All of the bickering that must take place at Microsoft about what product does what would be (somewhat) reduced.  It's all in the same family now, at least.  Tony Soprano would be happy. Customers get a more unified vision of the company.  Feature integration, licensing policies, release dates all begin to line up.

When Sharepoint 1.0 shipped, it was based on the Exchange store from Exchange 2000.  While there have been many upheavals at Microsoft on the topic of stores (e.g. Yukon, Kodiak, WinFS, etc.) I can't understand why Sharepoint just didn't latch onto the Exchange train and be part of the Exchange brand.  Be the Exchange Document Manager, or Exchange Enterprise Portal or whatever.

Many decisions like that probably took place to get us to where we are today.  It's time to start looking back and seeing whether those decisions still hold up.

Comments

[Michael Sampson]

Chris, see here http://www.shared-spaces.com/blog/2005/01/response_to_the.html for my response.