I agree, this is a huge step forward and am glad that Microsoft is integrating these features into the product. Smaller organizations or less regulated organizations will benefit greatly from these advances. I hope their feedback is accepted and integrated into the next revisions of these features as well.

I am disappointed that these features are not inclusive of a platform that can accommodate the variety of customer scenarios that exist. Specifically customers who have a need to place certain mail on alternative stores and still use the messages like a part of their existing mailbox is absent. I understand this is not the norm for all customers; however, customers who have already invested in archival systems and storage are required to use specialized storage for long-term retention, or have other needs to do this are still restricted by the limitations of stub items within the mailbox. Ideally, a customer should be able to define folder in a mailbox that points to off-server stores yet still be indexed by Exchange. This would have a number of benefits as the data could be seamlessly managed and easily discovered through Exchange yet still reside on properly regulated storage.