At my company, groupSPARK – the leader in Private Label Exchange Hosting, we watch all Microsoft Exchange Server-related developments very closely for obvious reasons. I have to admit that this new development caught me off guard. To understand the significance of this change, let’s look at the history first.
Microsoft Exchange Server has the largest share in email server software today and Lotus Domino/Notes continues to lose market share to Exchange. Organizations pay a massive premium for the collaboration and accessibility features that POP3 email lacks. Because the market for groupware email software is lucrative, numerous companies have tried to take market share from Microsoft Exchange Server for many years by writing their own email server software and replicating the groupware functionality of Exchange Server – such as calendar sharing – and tying into Microsoft Outlook client. I still remember installing Samsung Contact years ago!
Since Microsoft started bundling Outlook into the Office suite, Outlook has slowly become the most ubiquitous email client used by organizations. In my opinion, Outlook was the key to Lotus Domino’s decline as the Lotus Notes client was never as good. And it is because of Outlook’s immense popularity that every entrant to the email server market has had to figure out how to integrate with Outlook – this is invariably the key to their success. Many of these companies tried doing this by writing an Outlook plug-in so that Outlook could communicate with their server using their own proprietary protocols, but the plug-ins were usually a pain to install and didn’t integrate deeply. However, companies like Zimbra spent a lot of time and resources and ultimately succeeded in reverse-engineering the Microsoft protocol used between Exchange and Outlook to communicate. This protocol is called MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface) and Microsoft has kept it confidential so that Exchange competitors can’t tie into Outlook.
BUT, it’s a secret no more! Yes, Microsoft has now made available the entire MAPI protocol for licensing to anyone, including competitors. And they’ve renamed it from MAPI to Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol. I suspect that Microsoft is finally doing this now in response to the ruling in the European Union which dictates that Microsoft must open up its communication protocols to the industry.
So, is the downfall for Microsoft Exchange Server beginning ? No, not really. Over the years, more and more features have been added to Exchange that make it much better: more robust, fault tolerant, deep integration with other Microsoft products, and productivity features such as Instant Messaging, Unified Messaging, increased collaboration. As the economy continues to focus more on the knowledge worker, the productivity features that Microsoft adds become more valued. But, this development does make Exchange Server vulnerable to competitors that will offer half the functionality for half the price – I believe that these alternatives will be successful at the low end and occupy a space between POP3 and Exchange. Within the next few years, there will more credible competition chipping away at Microsoft Exchange Server’s dominance, which will force Microsoft to innovate faster. The messaging market just got a whole lot more interesting!
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