Exchange Server Demystified

I've recently had several customers ask me about Exchange Server if it's something that their business could benefit from.  I thought I'd take a few minutes to try to explain as simply as possible what it does and how it can benefit your company.

Exchange server is Microsoft's messaging and collaboration platform. You may think that it's just a mail server but there is much more that it can do to help your company securely share information with your employees. It is designed to work with Microsoft Outlook and many data enabled "smart phones" including Apple's iPhone.

You're probably familiar with the default folders in Outlook or Outlook Express, your inbox, sent items, calendar etc.. Exchange gives you the ability to share those folders with anyone in your organization. Your assistants can have have read and write access to your calendar.  Your sales managers can have read access to your calendar to see when you are fee for a new client presentation. You can also have public folders that everyone can see by default. A public calendar works great for scheduling vacations and seminars, a public contact list gives everyone updates to addresses or phone numbers instantly and  makes managing mailing lists much simpler than without exchange. Again all of these items can be set to allow only the folks you choose to be able to view, add and edit the items on a per user basis so different departments can have their own group of folders.

Backing up and restoring messages and contacts becomes much easier with exchange in place too. If you don't have a central mail server and one of the hard drives fails in a workstation or someone has their laptop stolen, that information may be irretrievably lost. With Exchange all of the data is stored on the server.   We can even recover messages quickly and easily that that have been accidentally or maliciously deleted.

One of my favorite features of Exchange is how well it integrates with today's "smart phones". With most Windows Mobile based phones and the iPhone,  the functionality is built right into the device and requires no additional software purchase.  Blackberry users do need a BES server installed to connect to exchange with their device. T this  basically makes your phone a clone of your Outlook client at work and automatically syncs all of your data and information. You can view, edit and forward emails you have in outlook, when you add a contact to Outlook it's instantly available on your phone and vice versa.   But even better than just syncing, if you reply to a message on your phone it appears in the same sent items folder in outlook - no more trying to remember where you sent the message from because it all ends up in the same place. For some industries it may even be a legal requirement for you to be able to track all customer communications.

One more feature that you might not know about is webmail. This allows you to securely connect to your mailbox through your web browser even if you're not in the office. All you need is an internet connection and Internet Explorer.

These are just some of my favorite features in Microsoft Exchange. If you have any further questions regarding an Exchange server or anything else please give us a call. We'd be happy to answer your questions.