Exchange Server 2007 is going to be serviced by Microsoft in a unique, new way that will be a substantial improvement for customers in terms of system reliability, release predictability, and overall quality of software patches. Our goal with servicing Exchange 2007 is to respond to mission critical problems as quickly as possible with high quality fixes, and here’s how we are going to do it:

Exchange 2007 has been engineered from the start in a different way than previous versions of Exchange. One of the big investments we have made in the product is actually something customers will never see - a revolutionary test product that builds alongside the shipping code which allows an unprecedented amount of functional tests, validations, and scenario checking. Because of this tight integration and checking, our build system for Exchange 2007 is capable of building ship-quality maintenance releases on a regular basis. A simple way to think about this is that for every code defect found in the shipping product, a corresponding test case gets checked into and built within the test product. They are then run against each other and results are analyzed for any residual problems. The end result of this integration is that instead of shipping over time a large number of small, contained spot fixes for individual problems, we will continually build these into the product and ship cumulative rollup patches that correct all customer-reported and fixed issues on a predictable, ongoing basis.