Q&A

Managing inboxes give IT managers headaches

Microsoft admited that some aspects of software licensing policies have not found favor with customers. Amit Mehta, Director, Unified Communications, Microsoft India talked about the learning from previous products that went in the making of Exchange Server 2010. By Aditya Kelekar

Amit Mehta Director, Unified Communications, Microsoft India

How are IT managers coping with complex communication needs. Have you addressed these concerns in Exchange Server 2010?

They are struggling. IT managers want to find ways to lower the cost of deployment. People are spending a lot of their time either on their emails or their phones. As the information load on the email boxes grow, IT managers want to provide for larger mail boxes and have to cope with increasing storage. The challenge becomes all the more serious when people are mobile and their boxes are full. We have kept these findings in mind while designing Exchange 2010, which provides for SATA-based storage, a much more cheaper option than SAS-based storage.

Businesses have been asking us whether we can help them better manage their inbox and how could they blend it with their unified communication environment. Businesses want a consistency of information presentation across various modes of communication.

What was the feedback you received on software licensing costs?

Yes, many enterprises are concerned about software licensing. A lot of times companies end up providing software to people who don't use it. They often use only a small fraction of it. Businesses have been wanting to know whether we could provide a low-intensity usage-based license.

How serious are the concerns related to efficient archival?

IT guys have not able to roll a company-wide archival system. The IT community has been asking us whether we could help provide an automatic archival policy and framework which could decide which email files needed to be archived and for how long.

The IT department is also concerned about managing risk in such an environment. They know that what employees have on their email can lead to potential risks for the organization depending on how the email is used.

Deploying high availability across different geographies has also been far from straightforward for IT managers.

— Aditya Kelekar