According to recent research, Microsoft Exchange accounts for 65% of email servers in use in organisations today. Many of these are deployments of Exchange 2003, for which Microsoft no longer offers support, and Exchange 2007. According to the Radicati Group, Exchange 2007 accounts for 44% of all enterprise on-premise deployments. However, with the release of Exchange 2010 and other related products by Microsoft, earlier versions of Exchange are losing market share. Radicati predicts that Exchange 2010 will account for 57% of total Exchange deployments by 2014.

Exchange 2010 offers many improvements over previous versions in areas such as more flexible and lower cost of deployment, easier access for mobile clients, and the introduction of email archiving, retention and discovery capabilities. These are just some of the reasons why many organisations are looking to upgrade to 2010 - but such migrations are not without risks in such areas as data loss and downtime, which affects productivity.

Email archiving specialist Mimecast held a seminar on 3rd November in London to explore the issues organisations face in migrating to the latest Exchange version, as well as Microsoft's new Office 365 software-plus-services productivity suite, which expands options for having services hosted, which takes much of the tasks of administration and management out of the hands of internal IT resources. Nick Caw from Microsoft was on hand to explore the benefits of these new products and services further.

As a specialist in email management services, Mimecast is offering services to those organisations looking for a pain-free migration to these new services. It will also introduce its capabilities in add-on services for Microsoft products and services to offer a more complete and robust email archiving capability for organisations that need something more advanced, including always-on capability, even in the event of a server outage.

Bloor Research contributed to the event, looking at the need for email archiving as well as considerations in selecting a vendor, including a look at the capabilities of some of the major players on the market. Slides will be available from this link in due course.