Why Exchange 2007

For most businesses today, e-mail is the mission-critical communications tool that allows their people to produce the best results. This greater reliance on e-mail has increased the number of messages sent and received, the variety of work getting done, and even the speed of business itself. Amid this change, employee expectations have also evolved. Today, employees look for rich, efficient access—to e-mail, calendars, attachments, contacts, and more—no matter where they are or what type of device they are using.

For IT professionals, delivering a messaging system that addresses these needs must be balanced against other requirements such as security and cost. Enterprise security requirements have become more complex as the demand and use for e-mail has increased. Today, IT departments must contend with e-mail security threats that are wide ranging: continually evolving spam and viruses, noncompliance risks, the vulnerability of e-mail to interception and tampering, in addition to the potential harmful effects of natural and man-made disasters.

While security is clearly a priority, IT is ever cognizant of the need to manage cost. Time, money, and resource constraints are a fact of life as IT is made accountable to do more with less. As a result, IT professionals look for a messaging system that addresses both enterprise and employee needs while also being cost-effective to deploy and manage.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 has been designed specifically to meet these challenges and address the needs of the different groups who have a stake in the messaging system. The new capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 deliver the advanced protection your company demands, the anywhere access your people want, and the operational efficiency you, in IT, need.

Why use Microsoft Exchange?

Most small and mid-sized businesses are using email as a primary communication channel with customers, colleagues and suppliers. But many of these companies stop there, missing out on productivity-boosting features like shared calendars, contact information and files.

By upgrading to the world's most popular business messaging software, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, you can significantly raise your team's efficiency for a small monthly fee.

Basically, Exchange is a computer server that stores your company's email, calendars, address books and files centrally, so they are available 24x7 and can be shared among your team, if you wish. It is the messaging system of choice for most Fortune 500 corporations.

Advanced Features

People running Exchange as their email server typically use Microsoft Outlook 2003 as their email ‘client'. Among many advanced features, this lets them:

• Securely access email remotely – via the Web or a mobile device like a BlackBerry or Treo
• View colleagues' up-to-date calendars and schedule meetings
• Assign and manage company tasks on central 'to do' lists
• Manage contact information of employees and customers and access it anytime
• Share documents across the team so everyone's working from the most current version

Exchange is a quantum leap from basic POP3 or IMAP4 email and makes your team much more productive through constant access to email, calendars and contacts, as well as important files and information.

Basic POP and IMAP email systems, which are currently used for accessing email, are more suited to home and personal user, rather than business, and were never designed to include the broader, richer collaborative tools that Exchange has made possible.

Now that hosted Exchange is available for no upfront cost, with low monthly fees, smaller and mid-sized companies are increasingly realizing the instant competitive advantage that Exchange can give them.

Outlook/Exchange 2007 vs Basic Email

To help you understand the productivity-boosting options that Exchange offers, here is a comparison of Outlook/Exchange 2003 versus basic email options:

	Exchange Server 2007	POP 3 / IMAP4
Group scheduling
Send out meeting requests, then track and update them
Shared calendars and side-by-side calendar views
Access to personal and shared address books from remote locations
Outlook single sign-on for email and network access		Some solutions
Outlook connections over the Internet are secure		Some solutions
Server-side spam filtering		Partial
Put multicolored flags next to emails as a reminder to follow up
Ability to add voting buttons to a messages
Automatic out-of-office reply
Ability to recall sent messages
Support for multiple-computer access		Partial
Access to email via Web browsers and mobile browsers, Outlook Mobile in Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs, Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphones		Non-Microsoft products are typically required
Outlook Cached Exchange Mode for working with intermittent Web connection (eg dial-up)		Some solutions offer caching
Offline email, calendar, contacts, and public folder support		Partial
Access to public folders for sharing documents and information		Individual email folder access in IMAP
Basic email support for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4
Easy management of Outlook and Exchange Server profiles across multiple machines to lower support costs