Update 3/5/2014: Added a note about anonymous comment moderation.
It’s been a while since we posted something related to intent and operation of this blog. Since our first post in 2004, we have worked hard to give you the latest news and upcoming details about various versions of Exchange that were “new” and “in-market” at the time. Yup, some of us have been with the blog from day one.
First and foremost, this blog is the official blog of the Exchange Product Group (the “Exchange Team”). This is the same team of program managers, developers, testers, and other engineers at Microsoft that build Exchange for both on-premises releases and for Exchange Online/Office 365. In many respects, one could think of this scenario as us creating one product and then shipping different product SKUs. While this is a bit of an oversimplification, think of it as a single code base that gets shipped to different customers in different ways. We went into some detail around explaining how this process works in our Servicing Exchange 2013 post(one of the crucial points being that the speed of innovation/engineering).
Please note that this post is not about the benefits or challenges of choosing one approach to deploying Exchange over the other. Suffice it to say that there are many different considerations organizations go through when deciding what the right approach is for them. We understand this diversity is here to stay, hence our recent post about The Road Ahead.
We Listen and Respond to Your Feedback
As always, we listen to and consider all customer feedback. It’s clear from the comments from readers of this blog that some of you feel that we are trying to deliberately push more Service-related content, with the ultimate motive being “to get everyone to Exchange Online.” And you’ve said that you want more “Exchange Team” and fewer “Office 365 Team” blog posts.
Since from engineering viewpoint, there is no difference, we plan to continue sharing engineering advancements with you about it all on this blog. Restricting this blog to on-premises content simply does not make sense, given the diversity of our customer base (on-premises, Exchange Online, hybrid mode, etc.).
Thus, in response to your feedback, we've created an On premises tag for all posts that are related to on-premises subjects, allowing you to readily view only on-premises content. Please know that if you only follow on-premises content, you might miss out on early views of product features delivered to Exchange Online first, and include those features in future on-premises releases or updates as appropriate (Rajesh’s post Development cadence in a cloud world reflects this). We believe this approach is the best way to provide a single location for all things Exchange while providing you the choice to select the types of content you feel is appropriate to your current situation. To be really clear: if a specific post applies to both on-premises as well as Exchange Online, it would be tagged as both.
A note about post comments
For a while now, we've been considering turning off anonymous comments. It has become a bit of a necessity to go through comments posted over a typical weekend and clean off the inevitable (and creative!) comment spam. While already making tweaks to the blog, we've decided we will turn off anonymous commenting on March 1st. That will give you a bit of time to register with TechNet and keep giving us feedback, and will give us a way to keep the blog comments free of those “special offers” much easier.
Note: We have turned on anonymous comment moderation starting today (3/5/14). If you're not signed in, you will still see the comment form but comments will go into the moderation queue automatically. We do not plan to actively monitor this queue. Please register, and let us know if any issues!
We commit to keep sharing relevant content with all of you, no matter which combination of our products you are using (and even if you’re not using them <g>).
Nino Bilic
