Microsoft Cloud Server - Microsoft Exchange Email, Tasks & Calendars

Microsoft Exchange Server

Exchange Server is the leading collaboration product from Microsoft. Catering to businesses of all sizes, this scalable and proven platform is the point solution for all your email, calendar, and contact needs.

Contents 1 Collaboration Requirements 1.1 Email 1.2 Calendar 1.3 Contacts 1.4 Tasks 1.5 Availability 2 Features of Microsoft Exchange Server 2.1 Email Features 2.2 Calendar, Contacts and Collaboration 2.3 Availability 2.4 Unified Messaging 3 GigeNET and Microsoft Exchange Server

Collaboration Requirements

As businesses grow, so do the complexity of their interactions. Solutions that work in one situation need to scale up when circumstances change. The classic example is when a business is small, most of it's document collaboration can be managed using a network share. As the number of employees increases a full fledged document collaboration suite is necessary.

Similarly when it comes to communications, organizations need a solution that can grow along with them. One that scales gracefully as the number of employees keep increasing. Microsoft Exchange Server is an example of one such technology. Suitable from the smallest business to the largest, its features have stood the test of time for years on end.

Below, we take a look at some of the needs of large organizations with respect to collaboration.

Email

Email is the most basic of all communication devices. Companies realize that critical business information is present in emails. Contract negotiations, documentation, and minutes are all enormously valuable to any business.

Therefore, it's no surprise that businesses choose to manage their emails on their own servers rather than outsource it to another company. But along with the safety comes added responsibility. Email policies as well as data retention policies can threaten to cripple your decision making process. Not to mention the considerable technical expertise that is necessary to manage an ever growing collection of email.

A standardized storage protocol that is both centralized and easily accessible is critical to the success of an email architecture along with server clustering to ensure that failures can be dealt with gracefully.

Calendar

Calendar functionality for an organization has a dual nature. It can be extremely useful and increase the productivity of your employees several times over, or it can be a complete dud. The reason is that using calendar capabilities on an organizational scale requires a bit of discipline on the part of users, and without that it'll be a waste. A tipping point in calendar usage occurs when a certain critical mass of users being to utilize it's functionality. Then it's a network effect as any person who doesn't use it is at a disadvantage compared to the rest.

Calendar functionality can be used for many things. Scheduling a meeting, keeping track of deadlines and workflow timelines can all be incorporated. When a large number of people need to collaborate, a common calendar functionality becomes a huge energy saver. Notifications, reminders, and alarms can be sent regarding specific events to a select group of people depending on who needs to know.

Calendar functionality integrates with email functionality and document management with the ability to attach and email notes to a specific event. The ability for users to make their own notes and modifications to the document (such as an agenda for a meeting) is especially useful from a collaborative point of view.

Calendar capability is also scalable and it's usefulness increases with the size of the organization, making it an invaluable tool if properly inculcated into the organization's culture.

Contacts

Proper contact management is critical in an organization and becomes more so as it grows. While it might be trivial in a small business with merely a dozen employees, it can become rather inconvenient in a larger business without a proper system to manage them.

This is particularly relevant when it comes to group management. Individual teams need to frequently communicate with each other on a regular basis and keeping track of who's who becomes a challenge if not managed properly. A proper contact manager sees to it that you're firmly in control of communication and are able to keep anyone in the loop who needs to know.

Tasks

Task management software can significantly contribute to your bottom line. In a time when employee productivity is at an all time low due to cell phones and other distractions, managers are using the tools provided by software to help their employees regain lost productivity. Task management is an example of such software which needs to be incorporated into the collaboration system of any organization.

Tasks need to be linked to dates via the calendering system as well as to people using the contacts system. On a larger scale, task management is subsumed by project management and collaboration. But those systems are extremely complex and not very well suited to smaller organizations. For small business, basic task management and integration with existing tools is sufficient.

Availability

Collaboration software is useless unless it is reliable. Unfortunately the servers responsible for the maintenance of such systems tend to go down when they're most needed either due to overload or due to malicious attacks. Effective collaboration systems make use of load balancing and backup solutions to maintain their high availability status.

This takes on greater importance as the organization grows larger. What is needed therefore is a collaboration system that scales gracefully as and when needed and can take on the additional load without necessitating an expensive change in architecture.

Features of Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is a complete collaboration software system which takes care of all the aforesaid needs of an organization. Each important functionality is fully fleshed out and neatly integrates with all the others. Below, we take a look at the implementation of each feature and see how it benefits organizations that require a stable and scalable collaborative system.

Email Features

Most business already have Microsoft Word installed on their systems, and with this comes the Outlook email client. Due to this ubiquity, virtually all businesses are in a position to make use of Microsoft Exchange Server email functionality right out of the box.

The Email facilities using Exchange Server allow users to set themselves free from any single platform. Exchange Server allows users to access their mailboxes not just from a computer, but from any mobile device using either a web service or a dedicated client. The universal adoption of Microsoft Exchange has allowed virtually every hardware manufacturer to enter into agreements to support a dedicated client on their mobile devices.

Microsoft Exchange also integrates all forms of communication such as Voicemail and chat along with email so that users aren't left fumbling for information that should be at their disposal - all the time.

Users are assigned individual storage space for their inboxes and can make use of integrated email archiving. Combined with state of the art security features, businesses can find a one stop stop for their email solutions using Exchange Server.

Calendar, Contacts and Collaboration

Exchange Server has recently seen a massive improvement of its entire calendering and contacts functionality. Recognizing that the real power of the calender in firms is the organization of meetings, it has introduced the Calender Concierge which aims to provide functionality that will simplify and speed up the process.

One such feature for example, is the ability of Exchange to automatically find the best times for meetings. It achieves this by going through everyone's calendar and finding the appropriate time slots by ascertaining when they're free. Taking cognizance of the fact that very often meetings are a conference call with members in different time zones, Exchange Server makes the necessary time zone adjustments as well. Users can easily see the color coded calendar to choose the most appropriate time.

Another powerful feature is the ability of Exchange Server to take care of all other resources while arranging a meeting such as available rooms, projectors, slides and TVs. Policies can be defined for automating resource booking depending on who is making the request and for how long. In case a request falls outside the policy, a path can be defined for approval and alternate resources can be scheduled.

Availability

As mentioned earlier, one of the hallmarks of a professional collaborative system is its ability to stay on track when hardware or software failures disrupt the architecture. Microsoft Exchange Server uses state of the art technology in order to ensure that business continuity is maintained in the face of errors that would cripple other systems.

Continuous replication on each server ensures that corrupted disk data doesn't result in data loss. The backups are taken automatically and result in a safe and secure environment for your precious emails.

In addition, the Active and Passive data model is used to make sure that even the failure of an entire server doesn't break your email. Exchange Server can be configured to have a passive server for every active server in use. The passive server can be located in a completely different location and shares the configuration and data of the active one. The end result is that even in the case of a catastrophic event where all the servers in an area go down, the passive servers will automatically pick up the flow.

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) also decreases the costs of backups and reduces the amount of information transferred periodically while at the same time keeping your data backups fully up to date.

Unified Messaging

These days, business communications take place over a wide range of media. Voicemail and Faxes are just as important as email, and sometimes even more so. A recent study showed that seven out of ten telephone communications were redirected to Voicemail. The need to integrate these diverse communication networks is now felt more than ever and Microsoft Exchange Server performs this by managing all of them in one central location.

If your business for example has a traditional PBX system, then all that is needed to integrate Exchange Server into your traditional Voicemail is a regular VoIP Gateway. However, if you already use an IP based PBX system, then you don't need any additional hardware to reroute all voicemail into a users Outlook box.

As far as faxes go, if it is a shared machine, Exchange Server makes use of OCR to try and determine who the fax is for, and if this is not possible, faxes can be sent to an administrative Inbox where a person will forward the fax to the appropriate user.

Once these facilities are in place, users can then access all their emails, Voicemail, Faxes and IMs from any Internet enabled device supporting the Outlook client (which is virtually all of them). This dramatically cuts down on wasted time and improves the productivity of the end user in addition to creating a central and easily manageable repository for all incoming messages.

GigeNET and Microsoft Exchange Server

GigeNET has been in business for quite awhile now (starting as a webhosting firm in '97) and has, for awhile, been a Microsoft provider. With Gigenetcloud (GigeNET's Cloud Server Product), Exchange clusters are extremely easy to build. Simply ask a Sales rep about our Microsoft Exchange pricing and away you go. GigeNET uses Microsoft Exchange for its internal Email/Calendar so not only do we offer it but we do in fact use it ourselves.

After moving from Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange has never had any problems for us and has a very nice web interface (outlook express) which allows employees to access their email from any computer in the world through our VPN. GigeNET highly recommends Exchange for all Enterprise level mail systems.