So how are people going on their HMC 4.0 deployments?

The Migration toolkit for HMC has been out for a while now and hopefully many of you HMC hosters – aspirational or live, will be looking to upgrade your platforms to get the benefits of Exchange 2007.

Exchange 2007 for hosters enables some new features such as Outlook Voice Access and a hugely improved Outlook web access experience and not forgetting a great story for Windows Mobile 6.

We mustn't also forget the great platform capabilities it brings to the table importantly DAS storage capabilities and new clustering technologies. – it makes the whole geographically dispersed DC a little more economical and practical.

So looking forward for a moment what's in the future for HMC?

Well the next version of HMC is being worked on as we speak. We are probably looking at a late Q1 release in calendar year 08 for this release. – Always subject to change!

What does it bring to the table? Probably the biggest omission from HMC 4 was LCS support. This was fundamentally due to the fact that we were due a new release of LCS – now called Office Communication Server 2007 (OCS).

So back in the next version of HMC will be support for Hosted OCS 2007 which will bring IM and presence back in as a core capability.

The whole Unified Messaging story is generating a lot of buzz. Hoster's are keen to get in on the action and it is possible to offer multi tenanted VOIP capabilities with Microsoft Hosting platforms. If you have commercial interest in this arena – get in contact with your local hosting lead from Microsoft in your region to see what is possible!

(if you have no idea who this is ping me and I'll see if I can help find you a contact!)

Gavin