Preface
Ask any employee at any modern company with more than 50 employees what their most critical computer application is. Most of them will tell you email without needing a second thought. While the World Wide Web helped fuel commercial interest in the Internet, email is the single top reason why companies are willing to spend the money for Internet connections. Email is an essential part of the workplace for both internal and external communications. On those days when I work from home, it is not uncommon to have no contact with my coworkers except through email.
As email changed from a luxury into a necessity, vendors began to add more features aimed at the corporate audience, such as calendars and shared message folders. Groupware was born. The first groupware applications were limited and crude. They did not scale well and took constant maintenance to stay operating. They had proprietary mailbox access protocols, cryptic command-line and text file configuration interfaces, and usually stored user mailboxes in a hierarchy of files and folders. Yet they worked well enough to become indispensable.
When Microsoft first introduced Exchange 4.0 in March 1996, it was a major step up from MS Mail, its previous messaging solution. At this time, the messaging landscape featured dozens of separate message transfer protocols and formats. It was not uncommon for a single enterprise to have multiple, incompatible mail systems, some managed on a department-by-department basis. There were ...