Finally my first paper for Microsoft IT has been published on the Microsoft IT Showcase site. It was hard but fun! BTW it would never had been completed without the help from Kay Unkroth and Pav Cherny from our technical writing team at Biblioso Corporation as well as all the Microsoft SME’s that put time into reviewing it.

Executive Summary

The Exchange Messaging team within Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) started the production rollout of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 at full scale in July 2006 using the beta 2 version of the product. For more than a year prior to this event, the Exchange Messaging team had deployed Exchange Server 2007 in the pre-release production environment to help the Exchange Server product group evaluate enterprise readiness.

The first server installation took place in the pre-release production environment in February 2005, more than 22 months before the product shipped. To put this time frame into perspective, Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server pre-release verification started three weeks before the release to manufacturing (RTM) date and the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 pre-release verification period was only six months. This shows how strong the relationship between the Exchange Server Product group and the Exchange Messaging team has grown over recent years. In fact, the Exchange Server Product group does not ship product versions or service packs now until the Exchange Messaging team signs off on the enterprise readiness. To demonstrate the enterprise readiness of the new Exchange Server version to customers, the Exchange Messaging team committed to perform the transition of the entire corporate production mailbox environment prior to the official RTM date. The team only had five months to finish the deployment in a large enterprise messaging environment with demanding power users.

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