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HOSTING GURUS
The “Microsoft Solution for Hosted
Exchange 2003” (HE2003) was a giant
step forward in the ability to support a
large number of customer organizations
and services.
network costs, higher operations expenses,
and increased complexity.
The second reason was scalability as it
relates to the number of “Organizations”
that could be deployed in a single
deployment of HMC. HMC v1 could
only support up to 800 organizations that
required Outlook client support. This was
due to an issue in Active Directory and the
implementation of multi-valued attributes
within the schema. There was no hard
limit to the number of organizations that
a Service Provider could host if they only
required support for Outlook Web Access,
POP3, or IMAP.
The third reason was the bursting of
the .com bubble. When this happened,
there was a huge downturn in the number
of companies that wanted to come online
and host corporate email. Many Service
Providers went out of business, while
others decided to focus on their then
current customer base, and defer new
ventures. There were still plenty of Service
Providers that did deploy HMC, but those
deployments didn’t match the deployment
scenarios defined in the solution. Often,
hardware was scaled back and a “bare
bones” approach was taken. Two or three
years earlier, hosts would have deployed a
solution that anticipated huge growth and
over-building the platform.
Hosted Exchange 2003
The “Microsoft Solution for Hosted
Exchange 2003” (HE2003) was a giant
step forward in the ability to support a large
number of customer organizations and
services. The largest of the changes was
the ability to support Outlook 2003 clients
through an Exchange Front-End server.
This was accomplished by supporting
RPC over HTTPS, thus removing the
requirement to host a VPN for clients that
wanted to access their Exchange data via
Outlook.
Exchange Server 2003 also provided
additional improvements to Outlook Web
Access, allowing for greater customization
and providing additional features that
could be enabled or disabled on a per-user
basis. Upgrading to Exchange Server 2003
also enabled a number of features and
improvements that made it a better platform
than its predecessors. For example, as the
Exchange Server 2003 product improved,
so did the solution that made Exchange
Server ready for Service Providers.
HE2003 also included a new namespace
called, “Hosted Exchange,” the key feature
of which is support for “Plans” (which
leverage a SQL Server Database to define
“feature bundling”). This allowed hosts
to enable and track services that were
deployed for hosted organizations and
users. The “Hosted Exchange” namespace
also leveraged the improved Resource
Manager that shipped with MPS. The
Resource Manager allows the host to
keep track of how resources are allocated
(e.g. Exchange databases, web servers or
disk usage). The new Hosted Exchange
Namespace also provided a new set of
“extensions” to the Resource Manager to
allow for additional support for queries,
moves, and reallocation of storage for
users and organizations.
The HE2003 solution also took a
different approach to HMC as it didn’t
have any direct tie to any third-party
product or hardware. This is both good
and bad, because it provides (or at least
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