Long a hallmark of a competitive corporate IT infrastructure, hosted email will soon receive a facelift of sorts for many, thanks to a new Service Pack for Microsoft Hosted Exchange 2010.

According to Jamie Fairbairn of Technorati, Redmond's received a fair amount of feedback from its ubiquitous hosted email platform, and factored in suggestions from around the world to provide an improved experience for the Hosted Exchange Service Pack 2, due to debut sometime in the second half of 2011.

Hosted Exchange has long functioned as a networked extension of the traditional Outlook email programme, found within Microsoft's Office family of products. The Microsoft Exchange Server's currently the market leader for email hosting.

However, the service has evolved since its mid-90s inception, and the Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2010 will reflect the latest the software developers have to offer.

Fairbairn said one of the highlights of the update will be the fixing of many bugs pointed out to Microsoft by Exchange users, increasing the reliability of the service.

"As well as incorporating recent fixes, it will also be updated with every previous fix that’s been rolled out prior to service pack 2 being released, making it more robust and reliable for new users," he said.

The company's also planned a low-bandwidth web application for the service pack, which will allow users accessing Exchange from older or slower devices to have a more text-based option by which to view email.

Other features include improvements in address book segmentation, and a more gradual solution for migration mailboxes and other data through a configuration wizard.

Written by Jason Morton
 

Improved Hosted Exchange coming from Microsoft