Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/27653
capabilities of their e-mail platform. If recent adoption and deployment success is any indicator, Microsoft has delivered a release that is worth your attention. WHY EXCHANGE 2010 FOR LAW FIRMS? It should be noted that mainstream support for Exchange 2003 ended in April 2009, and Exchange 2007 support ends in April 2012. Legacy systems tend to be distributed, but the cost to maintain and support these systems is very high. Providing reliable disaster recovery is both costly and complex. The rate of e-mail growth for most firms has exceeded what their current platform was initially designed to handle and, as a result, performance and reliability may be in question. Microsoft has addressed these concerns, and added a few new features that are specifically compelling to the legal industry. Large Mailboxes Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 together perform very well, even for users with large mailboxes. Mailbox sizes of 20GB, 30GB and 40GB+ are seen more frequently than before, and some organizations have reported single mailboxes with over one million items. When reviewing Outlook and Exchange performance issues, there are often two common contributors — inadequate disk Input/Output Per Second (IOPS, a key storage performance metric) for the Exchange storage subsystem, and excessive item counts within the Outlook critical path folders (Inbox, Sent Items and Deleted Items). Exchange 2010 represents a 70 percent “Some organizations have reported single mailboxes with over one million items.” reduction in the IOPS requirements from Exchange 2007, and a 90 percent reduction from Exchange 2003. This means that the days of expensive, high-performance 15K RPM disks are likely a thing of the past, and budgeting can now be based more on capacity than performance. Today’s workstations and Outlook 2010 client improvements have combined to allow item counts to reach nearly 100,000 when Outlook is deployed in Cached Exchange Mode, which is the recommended client configuration for most deployments. Minimizing item counts will always improve client performance, and set limits should not be tested. Search A unified search will query both the primary and archive mailboxes to provide a consistent search experience, and accommodate some new e-discovery capabilities. The archive mailbox is accessible natively by Outlook 2007 (with a hotfix), Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web App 2010 clients but, currently, the unified search functionality only exists in Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web App 2010. Multi-Mailbox Search provides new e-discovery features that accommodate activities such as legal discovery, internal investigations or human resources inquiries. Searches are issued through the Exchange Control Panel (ECP), a www.iltanet.org Exchange 2010 11