Last week, my column was on the forthcoming Exchange Edge Services product. Microsoft hasn’t said much about it publicly yet, but it’s pretty clear that they have two goals: provide a hardened subset of Exchange functionality for use on the edge, and displace Sendmail/postfix/qmail in shops that have Exchange at the core but not at the edge. Whether they succeed or not will have a lot to do with how they position Edge’s capabilities. Personally, I’m really excited about the prospect of being able to build my own services using managed .NET code– that approach offers a lot of potential over the current event sink model.