Last week, my column was on the forthcoming Exchange Edge Services product. Microsoft hasn't said much about it publicly yet, but it's pretty clear that they have two goals: provide a hardened subset of Exchange functionality for use on the edge, and displace Sendmail/postfix/qmail in shops that have Exchange at the core but not at the edge. Whether they succeed or not will have a lot to do with how they position Edge's capabilities. Personally, I'm really excited about the prospect of being able to build my own services using managed .NET code-- that approach offers a lot of potential over the current event sink model.