Deprecated Features

Throughout this book, you will learn of specific areas where features from Exchange 2000 have been deprecated or discontinued. Even at this point, however, you will notice a couple of obvious changes.

To start, Exchange 2003 no longer includes the instant messaging (IM), online conferencing, or chat components that were available within Exchange 2000. This functionality has been moved into a separate server the Microsoft Office Live Communications Server (LCS) that you can install and configure independently of Exchange. At present, no tools are available to migrate users or applications to LCS, but more tools and utilities might be available as the release date of LCS approaches.

Another feature that has been deprecated is Exchange's support for development of applications that access Exchange through the Simple Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) or MAPI CMC calls. Simple MAPI was a basic implementation of MAPI that offered limited functionality for sending and receiving email messages. Anything you could do with Simple MAPI, you could also do with Extended MAPI, which Exchange Server 2003 still supports. Common Message Calls (CMC) API was a cross-platform wrapper around basic MAPI functionality provided for C developers. Again, anything you could do with the CMC API, you can do with Extended MAPI.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For more information on developer technologies that have changed, check out Chapter 12, "Application Development," page 145.

Finally, if you had created collaborative applications based on Exchange 2000's Installable File System, you might need to do some recoding. With the release of Exchange 2000, an M: drive was mapped to the Exchange information store that you could use to directly access information held within Exchange folders. This drive mapping has been discontinued, but you can still continue to reference the information through the //backoffice/ mapping path.

MAPPING THE M: DRIVE AGAIN

If you have a mission-critical application that specifically uses the drive letter mapping, you can add it back using a registry key setting in Knowledge Base Article 821836 found on Microsoft's Web site (http://support.microsoft.com).

OUTLOOK 2003

For more information on what's new and improved in the latest version of Outlook, check out Chapter 9, "Outlook 2003," page 113.

INSTALLING EXCHANGE

To see what is new in the installation and configuration process for Exchange 2003, flip forward to Chapter 3, "Installation," page 19.

FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPERS

If you are an application developer wanting to integrate Exchange 2003 into your applications, check out Chapter 12, "Application Development," page 145.