Microsoft Exchange 2007 Upgrades to Begin
Although Microsoft Exchange 2007 was released earlier in the year, the first service pack
didn’t come out until the end of November. Conventional wisdom says that after the first service
pack is available you can safely use a Microsoft server. Now that the first set of bugs has been
found and fixed, Exchange 2007 is ready for prime time.

There are 3 significant factors that will drive many companies to migrate over:

1. Microsoft Exchange 2007 is a superior product vs. previous versions. This is reason enough for many.

2. Mainstream support for Exchange 2003 will end soon. Microsoft’s support plan indicates that after
April 2009 all they will do for Exchange 2003 is patch any significant problems that arise. No enhancements
or improved feature functionality. Those who want to receive mainstream support from Microsoft therefore
have 16 months in which to migrate to Exchange 2007.

3. Exchange 2007 has unified communications capabilities. As I discuss below, we expect to
see a huge demand for this in 2008.

Unified Communications Will See a Big Push
"Unified communications" refers to technology that integrates experiences currently associated with
the telephone (phone calls, voice mail and conferencing) into work done on a computer (email, calendar,
documents, spreadsheets and instant messaging). For example, unified communications can enable you
to receive emails as voice mails – and vice versa.

Three or 4 major vendors, including Microsoft and Cisco, now have products that offer unified
communications capabilities (including Exchange 2007), and they all plan significant marketing
campaigns in 2008 aimed at convincing corporate America that this is something they need to have.

We believe these marketing campaigns will be so successful that corporations that don’t already
have an initiative to do this will in 2008. We expect demand for unified communications to be like
the demand for Blackberries – executives everywhere will want it. Delivering these capabilities
will pull a lot of other projects and things in, including hardware, software, people and resources.

Microsoft SharePoint Will Be More Widely Adopted
SharePoint, Microsoft’s enterprise-wide information portal, makes it easy for individuals, departments
and teams to connect and collaborate regardless of their physical location, and provides a sophisticated
document storage, management and sharing platform. We saw significant interest in SharePoint in the
later half of 2007, and expect this interest to grow in 2008.

We foresee that more and more of corporate America will find significant value in deploying SharePoint
internally to help them with a variety of things, including controlling and archiving documents, improving
work flow, enabling collaboration, organizing information, simplifying web content management, and more.

Companies Will be Forced to Consider Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007
Since it was first released, the reaction to Windows Vista and Office 2007 has been extremely negative.
People are quite put off by the change in interface, and are loath to take the time to learn to use it, even
if there may be a potential long-term benefit in doing so.

2008 will be the year that Microsoft begins to attempt to force the adoption of Vista. How? By not selling
or making available Windows XP. Beginning either this month or next, Microsoft plans to start preventing
the major PC manufacturers from shipping new PCs with anything other than Windows Vista. This will drive
decision making in corporate America, as companies will be forced to choose between going forward with
a Vista migration, keeping on XP or considering alternatives.

In addition to the fact that most new PCs will now come with the new software, some of the capabilities
of Exchange 2007 work best with Office 2007. Those who are upgrading to Exchange 2007 will also be
forced to consider Office 2007.

Windows Server 2008 Will be Released in the First Quarter of 2008
This new server promises simpler administration, built-in virtualization and the
new Internet Information Server 7.

All told, there will be a lot going on in 2008! As always, please don’t hesitate to contact
us when you need help deploying, optimizing, fixing or upgrading your enterprise
IT infrastructure

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