We've been hard at work on Exchange 14 (E14) for a few years now, and although we've shared a lot of details and code with customers on our TAP & Live@edu programs, we haven't been too chatty publicly. That's going to be changing over the coming months, starting with this first introductory video[1] with myself and Jim Lucey, the product manager for Exchange Labs, to talk a little bit about some of the work we've been doing.

One of the biggest things that's different in E14 is that we started from day 1 two years ago with the goal of building a product on a single codebase that could be deployed in the way Exchange has been for over a decade in on-premise environments, as well as also be deployed in a service environment and scale to (eventually) hundreds of millions of users.

I say 'eventually' because we're not quite there yet. We have only 3.5 million users right now :) I know, chump change, right?

The service thinking really got traction at the company when Ozzie wrote his software plus services memo, and that has been our mindset from the beginning of the E14 development cycle, affecting everything we do - what features we should build, how we architect them, how we test the code, how we get customer feedback, etc. Although Exchange has always been a group that's very reliant on dogfooding, even with Microsoft's ~100,000 mailboxes, that wasn't enough for us to validate our high scale. So that's why we started using Exchange 14 in Exchange Labs back in October 2007 as part of the live@edu program.

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