Sep 20, 2012
Sep 20, 2012
Never be fooled into thinking that Microsoft Exchange is just an email server and nothing else.
Although it does indeed handle and store your company’s email, it also serves calendars, address books and (together with SharePoint) files centrally, thus ensuring that they are available 24x7 and can be shared within your team. It is for this reason that Exchange is the messaging system of choice for most Fortune 500 corporations.
Of course, companies running Exchange as their email server will typically use Microsoft Outlook as their email ‘client’ but not just. Hosted Exchange combined with Outlook also delivers other important business benefits. So what else is Outlook?
Outlook is a digital organizer, able to manage contact information of employees and customers and access it anytime. Within the email interface you can access the company directory and your individual contacts, view and update your calendar, manage tasks and even create calendar entries from email invites, create group email messages from your contacts list and automatically turn an email to an item on your task list. Features such as Scheduling Assistant, resource sharing and social network integration will be of assistance to further streamline common business activities.
Outlook gives you access, anywhere. In today’s business world, your level of responsiveness is critical. Exchange gives you instant access anywhere so that when an email is sent to you, it’s immediately pushed to your desktop, laptop, tablet or other mobile phone. Exchange allows users to securely access email remotely, both via a Web browser or a mobile device like a BlackBerry or iPhone.
As to admins, Hosted Exchange gives them a highly intuitive management interface in which many commonplace tasks are simplified to the point of ease. Adding multiple Hosted Exchange users can be started and finished in just minutes. Most permissions, security, storage and mobile access tasks are point-and-click jobs in the control panel instead of nightmarish troubleshooting directories. This is even more simplified through solutions such as BMIT’s Cloud platform which provides for service management through its own service portal and thus simplifies management considerably.
Exchange is a far cry from basic POP3 or IMAP4 email and is poised to make your team much more productive by providing a constant access to email, calendars and contacts, as well as important files and information. The broader, richer collaborative tools that Microsoft Exchange Server has made possible make it the most powerful messaging and collaboration platform available for businesses today. Its features for email, contact management, calendaring, mobile access to messages, and much more are quite simply unparalleled.
Finally, through ancillary features such as active directory synchronization offered by providers such as BMIT, you would be able to maintain a single set of login usnername and password (single sign on) for your Windows, domain, mail and other applications using Microsoft’s Active Directory functionality.