Subtitles of the Movie

Now in the next couple of videos, I'm going to do this video Part 1 and then we're going to do a Part 2, I'm going to talk about Exchange history and let me warn you here, this is going to irritate some of you old crusty Exchange administrators, OK? But these two videos are for the new people. For those of you who are new to Exchange I want you to understand where this came from. It'll help you not look like such a newbie to everybody else in the Server room on the administrative staff, and it will help you understand how some of this stuff developed, OK? So, just, if you're, if you're familiar with all this stuff skip these two videos and don't irritate yourself, OK? But Exchange actually started with the release of Exchange Version 4.0. Obvious question, what happened to Exchange 1, 2, and 3? They were actually kind of released as different products and this all happened in 1996. Exchange 1, 2, and 3 went through this very confusing set of Microsoft Mail and some other things, but Exchange 4.0 was the first Server-based email solution that Microsoft released. Now 1996 was a very interesting year for a bunch of reasons, the biggest being the Internet really took off in 1996. We had a guy named Bill Clinton and a guy named Al Gore who were giving a lot of attention to the Information Super Highway, and that thing was just coming along, it was a topic in the presidential elections, and in politics, and it just kind of helped to explode the idea of the Internet. Now Exchange 4.0 ran on NT Server 3.51 and we're using the word ran loosely there, OK, it was a cantankerous, unstable set of functionality, OK, we'll just leave it at that. The Internet was opening up to the public. The idea of email was new but it was really starting to catch on. Almost everybody had those irritating AOL addresses with numbers in them, and anyway, Exchange 4.0 provided persistent Internet connections. Now this was a big deal - always connected to the Internet. You didn't have to dial up and it used those incredible, fast technologies like ISDN. I used to know what that stood for, the only thing I remember is that it stands for It Still Does Nothing. And then there actually is a technical term but I don't know what it is. So anyway, and also if you remember back then we had 56K frame connections. We thought that was cool and it was at the time. Notice the year on this, the next year, one year, we got Exchange 5.0 in 1997. The reason we got 5.0 was because NT Server 4.0 came out. It was a major architectural change from 3.5.1, it solved a lot of the stability issues with NT Server and it was the first real serious release of an NT, or Windows Enterprise Operating system. The first version of Outlook was released in 97 with Office and everybody went nuts. It was a really cool email management tool. We also saw Schedule Plus and it gave us our first primitive calendaring service, and a Service Pack release late in 97, maybe early 98, gave us the actual first version of Outlook Web Access, and this was cool because we could now go through a Web Browser and get to our email on the Exchange Server and that caused quite a stir. Now, Exchange 5.5 is where everything really started to click for Microsoft in the email world and this happened, it was released in 1998, and this thing was still in use as soon as about a year ago in a lot of different places, alright. The cool thing about Exchange 5.5 was the Enterprise version gave you the capability of having mailbox databases that were larger than 16 gigabytes. Doesn't seem like much now. I think probably Office is a 16 gigabyte load now, probably not but it's getting close if you know what I mean. But databases over 16 gigabytes were starting to become a problem and Exchange 5.5 gave us that. Outlook Web Access was improved. It's been improved in every release of Exchange since then and 5.5 could co-exist with every release of Exchange up to and including Exchange 2003, OK, so that's about a what, six-year run, and actually until we went to Exchange 2007 which gave us another four years, so almost a 10-year life span there which is unheard of in technology nowadays, but until 2007 was released you could have a 5.5 Server in your environment and a lot of people did. So Exchange 5.5 cannot co-exist with Exchange 2007 or 2010 so once people started to introduce those two, especially 2007, 5.5 started to go away and there are still companies, I know here in Nashville, small companies running Exchange 2005. So anyway, Exchange 2000 was released in the year 2000 and this was what really, really broke through. This was the first version of Exchange, and it's actually the first major release from Microsoft to support the new Active Directory functionality and the Directory Service System. Exchange 2000 was the first time that we lost the old Directory Service in Exchange that was separate from the Operating System Directory Service. They were both melded into one. Active Directory began to store the Global Address List and the attributes on the users for mailboxes. It combined the Network and Email User Account into one single account. It changed everything. And I'll end this video with this little story. I went to the Role Out Dog and Pony Show in Exchange 2000, I think it was out in San Francisco, and there may be six or seven hundred people, I'm not sure, in the room, but at the end of the presentation these mini jaded nerds actually gave a standing ovation for the product they saw. You don't see that very often. We're used to hearing this is going to change everything, this is great and wonderful. We left there convinced this really was, and it really was. It changed a lot of things and we're still seeing the benefits of it today. So, anyway, with that little bit of historical trivia I'll end this video. This is the end of Part 1. Join me in Part 2 and we will complete talking about Exchange history to kind of let you know where this came from and how you got to where you are and especially to understand some of the things that come up when some of the more experienced administrators talk about prior functionalities and issues that you could still be dealing with as you phase some of these things out.