John Fontana wrote a detailed (as always) piece on Exchange 2007 after attending TechEd. He does a fair job of pointing out the changes that Exchange 2007 brings, including tying the Exchange routing architecture to Active Directory and the addition of new server roles that give you more flexibility in deployment. Some folks reported Fontana’s story as a net negative towards Exchange, but they left out some of the money quotes, including:
But Wenzel says the need for unified messaging, a major new feature of Exchange 2007, is driving his upgrade plan along with improvements in Outlook Web Access and search
In that same vein, Fontana’s story quotes Peter Pawlak of Directions on Microsoft as saying that “It is not trivial connecting a PBX to Exchange, and people will not [change] out their PBX for this product.” I can’t speak for “people”, but I know that many of the customers I’ve spoken to about Exchange UM are ready to do exactly that because they see the cost savings of eliminating legacy voice mail systems as well worth the one-time cost to upgrade to VoIP-capable PBXes– something that many customers are considering anyway.
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