Microsoft Corp. borrowed a page from the periodic table in choosing a code name for its latest server, Titanium.
The fourth edition of the Microsoft Exchange server, announced Tuesday, won’t be available until the middle of next year, the company said.
An added feature in Titanium is Volume Shadow-copy services, that allows “IT departments to pull remote servers closer to their end users into regional data centres,” said Jim Bernardo, product manager, Exchange Server, in Redmond, Wash. As well, more integration is now available to mobile workers, as the new server is interoperable with Outlook, and support for wireless devices is built into the server.
But there doesn’t appear to be anything particularly outstanding or “tech breaking” in the server announcement, according to one industry analyst, who explained that all Microsoft has said is it is going to following suit.
“(Clustering) is a really big theme in the industry and Microsoft is following along on that trend and trying to present the best case it can for Exchange to be able to ramp up a number of users per server, ” said Dwight Davies, vice-president and practice director at Summit Strategies in Kirkland, Wash.
Davies added that the software giant has made progress along the number of users per server path, but scalability is still a challenge when competing against directory servers and messaging servers.
The decision to integrate the once separate mobile server into Exchange does signal Microsoft’s backing of the increasing mobile workforce. However, Davies does not expect any massive migrations to happen soon. “Don’t expect a tidal wave of adoption for Titanium and that’s partly due to the incremental nature of the improvements that it (Microsoft) is introducing,” he said.