With a lot of cheer and bonhomie, the Exchange team bid farewall to CVP Terry Myerson little over a year ago. We were sad to see him leave Exchange, but happy that he was headed over to Windows Fone. The Exchange team had its Windows Fone wishlist ready!

Here it is, for the very first time in public, the Top 10 Windows Fone improvements, ruthlessly brainstormed and painstakingly prioritized by the Exchange team. These are likely to be released in an unscheduled over-the-air Windows Fone update.

  1. Prerequisites: New Prereqs for installing Windows Fone 7 on your phone.
    • .NET Compact Framework 3.5
    • Windows Powershell 2.0
  2. Processor requirements: New phone hardware will need to be 64-bit
  3. ActiveCloud: Windows Fone7 will offer seamless integration with the cloud using the new features tentatively named ActiveCloud. Phone numbers will be stored in the cloud (a Windows Live Account will be required). Contacts will be stored locally using ESE Mobile.
  4. Standard Edition: Windows Fone7 Standard Edition will be limited to making 75 outbound calls.
  5. High Availability: Windows Fone7 will introduce a new mobile high availability feature— Phone Clusters. This will require Windows Fone7 Enterprise Edition. Customers will see the value prop during Continuous Low Battery (CLB) failover, but will have to have redundant phones to implement.
  6. New hand gestures: Support for several new exciting hand gestures, including "single finger" dialing.
  7. Intelligent Call Filtering (ICF): ICF will no longer leverage SmartScreen, but instead, will utilize the newly-architected SailorMouth Call Rejection API. Each calll will be assigned a SCL value, and calls meeting the set thresholds rejected at the network level. Call rejection will be transparent to the user.
  8. PhoneBPA: Users will have the option for Windows Fone7 phones to automatically launch PhoneBPA upon startup
  9. Call Receive: Call Receive functionality will be added in SP1, and will also require a separate CAL to enable
  10. Phone Management Shell (PMS): PMS is the new Windows PowerShell-based phone management experience in Windows Fone 7. It'll introduce a simpler new paradigm for making calls - using CMDLETS! For example, to make a call, you'll simply need to run:

    Get-Contacts | Get-PhoneNumbers | Select-String -Pattern "Home" | Dial-Number -RetryOnBusy $true

    11. If you have any feedback about the above, or additional requirements you'd like us to consider for Windows Fone, please leave a comment.

    -- Exchange