Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate helps IT Professionals achieve new levels of reliability with greater flexibility, enhanced user experiences, and increased protection for business communications.

Flexible and reliable - Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment based on your company's unique needs and a simplified way to keep e-mail continuously available for your users.

Anywhere access - Exchange Server 2010 helps your users get more done by giving them the freedom to securely access all their communications - e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and more - from virtually any platform, Web browser, or device.

Protection and compliance - Exchange Server 2010 delivers integrated information loss prevention, and compliance tools aimed at helping you simplify the process of protecting your company's communications and meeting regulatory requirements.

For most businesses today, e-mail is the mission-critical communications tool that allows their people to produce the best results. This greater reliance on e-mail has increased the number of messages sent and received, the variety of work getting done, and even the speed of business itself.

Amid this change, employee expectations have also evolved. Today, employees look for rich, efficient access to e-mail, attachments, calendars, contacts,and more no matter where they are or what type of device they are using.

For IT professionals, delivering a messaging system that addresses these needs must be balanced against other requirements such as security and cost. Enterprise security requirements have become more complex as the demand and use for e-mail has increased.

Today, IT departments must contend with e-mail security threats that are wide ranging: continually evolving spam and viruses, noncompliance risks, the vulnerability of e-mail to interception and tampering, in addition to the potential harmful effects of natural and man-made disasters.

While security is clearly a priority, IT is ever cognizant of the need to manage cost. Time, money, and resource constraints are a fact of life as IT is made accountable to do more with less. As a result, IT professionals look for a messaging system that addresses both enterprise and employee needs while also being cost-effective to deploy and manage.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 has been designed specifically to meet these challenges and address the needs of the different groups who have a stake in the messaging system. The new capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 deliver the advanced protection your company demands, the anywhere access your people want, and the operational efficiency you, in IT, need.


Built-in Protection
Exchange Server 2007 offers built-in protective technologies to keep your business moving, reduce spam and viruses, enable confidential communications, and help your company to be compliant.

Key Benefits:
· Keeps communication alive and e-mail flowing with enterprise-class availability and reliability
· Helps safeguard users and the organization's valuable data from the harmful effects of spam and viruses
· Provides trusted communications within the organization automatically and without added cost or complexity
· Simplifies regulatory compliance in a way that supports the different needs of employees, compliance managers, and messaging administrators

Anywhere Access
With Exchange Server 2007, employees get anywhere access to their e-mail, voice mail, calendars, and contacts from a variety of clients and devices.

Key Benefits:
· Increases the productivity of today's employees who require the ability to respond quickly at home, work, or on the go
· Offers employees a single inbox to access all of their important communications-including voice mail, fax, and e-mail-while avoiding the cost and effort of maintaining separate systems
· Delivers a fast, seamless, and familiar Microsoft Office Outlook experience across different devices and clients with no requirement for extra software or services outside of an Internet or basic phone connection
· Improves collaboration and productivity by making it easier to find and share data, documents, and schedules from anywhere

Operational Efficiency
Exchange Server 2007 enables new levels of operational efficiency through capabilities that optimize hardware and networking investments and features that help make administrators more productive.

Key Benefits:
· Gets more from hardware, software, and network investments through the power of x64 computing and bandwidth-optimizing routing algorithms
· Improves administrator productivity by making it easier to find and fix problems, and automate tasks more simply
· Drives deployment efficiencies with automatic client connections, a new server roles-based architecture, and improved diagnostics and monitoring
· Simplifies integrating Exchange Server data within line-of-business applications and third-party solutions through new Exchange Web Services

The Outlook Experience
In addition to benefits and capabilities described above, Exchange Server 2007 offers the best integration with the broadest range of clients. Exchange Server supports a complete Outlook experience, from Outlook on the desktop to Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile, and the new Outlook Voice Access, a feature of Exchange Unified Messaging. Exchange Server also integrates with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and other Office applications as well as third-party systems and devices.

Requirements:

Processor
· x64 architecture-based computer with Intel processor that supports Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T) or AMD processor that supports the AMD64 platform; Intel Itanium family IA64 processors are not supported

Operating system
· Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 or Windows Server 2003 R2 x64, Standard or Enterprise Edition

Memory
· Minimum 2 GB of RAM per server;

Available hard-disk space
· Minimum of 1.2 GB on the hard disk where you install Exchange Server 2007 ( Additional 500 MB of available hard disk space per language if installing language packs for Unified Messaging beyond those included in the default installation )
· 200 MB on the system drive

Drive
· DVD, local, or network accessible

File format
· Disk partitions must be formatted for the NTFS file system, not the file allocation table (FAT) file system

Prerequisite software required
· Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0
· Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0
· Windows PowerShell
· Microsoft Active Directory; applies to all server roles except for Edge Transport
· Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) SP1; applies to Edge Transport server role

Limitations:

· 120 days trial