Exchange 2010 was long anticipated and had a lot of new collaboration features that was just sitting there waiting to make the most of each business day. Being a cloud computing and hosting wholesaler, Ilait has always strived to be positioned at the technical frontline, but our commitment to our resellers to deliver the best possible service also means that reliability and long term stability is non-negotiable. So when the Exchange RTM hit the market in 2009 we pretty soon realized that not everything was in the box so to speak. The promised multi-tenancy features were still missing which led to us having some in-depth technical discussions with Microsoft about our proof of concept based on the public beta, and ultimately we came to the conclusion that we would have to wait; Exchange 2010 was not ready for hosting, yet.
Microsoft wanted to really walk the extra mile for us hosters and multi-tenancy as we know it was to be implemented in Service Pack 1. When Service Pack 1 was released in August last year, the so called "hosting mode" was introduced in Exchange 2010. Deploying Exchange 2010 in "hosting mode" means that legacy features such as Public Folders (which future is uncertain as is) and Exchange Management Console are no longer part of the product, which is basically no loss from our perspective as we only really care for the nitty gritty API stuff; cmdlets and Remote Powershell that is in case of Exchange 2010. Even more questionable is that with "hosting mode" integration with other products such as Lync and SharePoint is completely out of the question.
So for over a year now we have been running quite a lot of integration tests with our current environment layout. This includes creating seamless migration paths, further customizing our tailor made Autodiscover solution, enabling better branding possibilities for our resellers and much more. There have been several moments during these 12-13 months that we have thought of putting it all in production but we have hesitated since the future of the so called "hosting mode" felt a little shaky and as I mentioned earlier in this post long term stability is key in our world. Two weeks ago the Microsoft Exchange Team published a blog post revealing Future of /Hosting Mode which states that;
No additional functionality or features will be added to /hosting mode, however, and we don’t recommend using /hosting mode going forward due to its reduced feature set and the fact that it will add complexity to future upgrades.
From an Ilait perspective we are of course glad that we did not hasten to release and can now collaborate with Microsoft better to prepare for a release giving you all the benefits from Exchange 2010, without the "hosting mode" limitations. As Service Pack 2 is expected this fall, which includes features and provisioning logic that we've been waiting for, we are now already preparing for the upcoming deployment.
I can assure you that when we release Hosted Exchange 2010, in a not so distant future, we will be delivering something extra, and given all the testing and tweaking that we have been doing for quite some time now, such as improvements to reseller branding, seamless migration/upgrade and some new features as well will hopefully make up for the long wait. So finally, thanks for your understanding!
Michael Abrahamsson
CEO
