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All things concerning email hosting and Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange were discussed at the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) 2012, an event that was held at the end of September in Orlando, Fla. At the MEC, there was a list of speakers and Exchange peers who met face-to-face to share valuable information on both the new and old versions of Exchange.

According to Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange 2013 which is rumored to arrive in late 2012 or early 2013 will not only have built-in data loss prevention (DLP) security solutions to detect potential data breach incidents and protect and safeguard sensitive data from loss due to malicious threats and attacks, but will also address performance issues, have increased interconnectedness and feature a new, simplified architecture for those organizations that rely on the cloud to enhance their business capabilities. It will even supply the enhanced messaging policy tools to move organizations to the cloud if they want, as well as help them manage communications across multiple devices, control information across environments and share information easily.

Users will find the new Exchange will also be enabling them to be more sociable, according to the Director of Product Management, Michael Atalla who revealed that the offering will in fact include enhanced methods for enabling collaboration. Atalla added that businesses and individuals alike can look forward to a Hosted Exchange infrastructure where email hosting and collaboration will be much easier than ever before.

This significantly enhanced version of Exchange will include two of the five server roles from Exchange 2010:Client Access Server, which acts as a proxy between the clients and the Mailbox server, and Mailbox, which now incorporates the functionality of the previous Hub Transport and unified messaging roles to communicate with client access protocols.

Additionally, Exchange 2013 will be customizable to integrate new client capabilities in Outlook Web App (OWA) and Outlook 2007 and later and offers users a new e-mail experience through a single, easy-to-use, Web-based administration interface and a new browser-based management console called the Exchange Administration Center (EAC) which will provide server group related services, role-based access control and management of shared mailboxes and distribution lists.

In addition to on-site mailboxes, for the first time Exchange will feature a brand new version of "modern public folders” that are available to Office 365 users; something that was not possible with Exchange Online.

The major benefits of Exchange 2013 as mentioned above are its storage performance, built-in anti-malware protection and support of Outlook and OWA by integrating apps from Office, which are all in addition to the site mailboxes which bring Exchange e-mails and SharePoint documents together which provides a new way to collaborate. With this email hosting platform in place, users will have access to collaborative authoring functions using public folders, which make it easy to distribute any type of information amongst servers.