Microsoft today finally launched its long-awaited Exchange 2000 messaging and collaboration platform, at the same time introducing, in typical Microsoft style, a host of features and capabilities that won't be available until next year.

The launch, which took place at the Exchange Collaboration and Solutions conference here amid rock music and pyrotechnics, provided few surprises, including the introduction of the Mobile Information Server (aka "Airstream"), which will appear sometime in the first half of 2001.

The MIS will give users access to their Exchange email, contacts, tasks and calendar functions on any Web-enabled mobile device. The server will also enable users to receive instant notifications of selected events on their wireless devices.

The product will also ship with a software development kit. It is in limited beta right now and will move into a larger test phase later this fall, Microsoft officials said.

Local Web Storage, Tahoe
Apart from the MIS, the two features of Exchange 2000 that drew the most attention were the new Local Web Storage System and the Tahoe document-management server.

The Local Web Storage System caches users' Exchange information on their local machines and enables them to synchronise it with the central server, allowing consistent access to this information when they are offline. The system, which ships with Exchange 2000, will also be included in the next release of Microsoft Office, dubbed Office 10.

"What this does is it allows requests for mail, calendar and other functions to be processed locally so that there is reduced network utilisation," said Russ Stockdale, vice president of the Knowledge Worker Solutions Group at Microsoft, in Redmond.

Tahoe, which Microsoft has kept a tight lid on in recent months, is an extension of the company's Digital Dashboard portal environment. It is meant to give users a single point of access for all of the information and applications that they use on a daily basis.

Tahoe users will be able to search across multiple repositories for corporate and Web-based information and documents as well as perform document-management functions such as check-in/check-out and version control.

Documents can be published to the Tahoe portal from within Office 2000, Office 10, Web browsers or Windows Explorer.

Beta 2 of Tahoe was made public today.

Another feature that won't see the light of day until the first half of next year is the new Office Designer. This new visual development tool, which will be part of Office 10, enables developers to create their own applications or use one of the seven Web templates that are included.

Microsoft is at www.microsoft.com.

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