Microsoft has placed Exchange 2000 at the centre of its revamped mobile strategy for helping enterprises tie mobile users into corporate IT systems.

The company officially launched the latest version of its application software at its Exchange and Collaboration Conference in Dallas today.

Microsoft is promising that Exchange 2000, which is built on Windows 2000 and a key .Net application server, is far more scalable than previous versions and that users can be supported on fewer servers. To improve collaboration the Exchange email database - Web Storage - has been designed to hold components such as Office documents as well as email.

Garry Tugwell-Smith, Exchange product marketing manager, said that Exchange 2000 supports XML, adding that a standard browser interface can be used to access a mailbox and that it contains features that make it easier for mobile users to access.

"With Exchange 2000 you can reduce the number of servers - in some cases [by] as much as four to one. We've also changed the database structure to make backup and restore more straightforward," said Tugwell-Smith, adding that the software giant had partitioned the messaging database in order to ease management.

This management is based heavily on Active Directory, Microsoft's directory technology that was introduced with the launch of Windows 2000. Analysts have said that one of the difficulties of Exchange 2000 deployment is that users will be rolling out two relatively unproven pieces of technology at the same time.

As a result, Microsoft is highlighting the need for planning and tools such as Visio 2000, which it is providing to help ease migration. It argues that rolling out Active Directory - which reduces the number of directories a company has to manage - is worth the effort.

"Active Directory can be a complicated beast but the effort of putting it in is a price worth paying, strategically, to have one directory in place," said Ewan Dalton, principal systems engineer at Microsoft's systems group.

Mitul Mehta, managing director at analysts TekPlus, predicted that Exchange 2000 would be successful and would have far fewer bugs than previous versions because Microsoft was taking testing and working with its partners far more seriously.

"Microsoft has tested with its partners and customers and got a lot of bugs fixed, though it will take two or three versions to iron out everything. Scalability will be quite good, although it will depend on its partners a lot for implementation," he said.

However, Mehta was less impressed by the product's mobile capabilities. "The market is moving towards mobile messaging and conferencing, and groupware vendors like Microsoft and Lotus are struggling to keep up in terms of features and techniques, whilst maintaining a robust platform," he said.