Technical Newsletter December 2009
How your small business can benefit from Exchange 2010.
Microsoft recently released Exchange 2010, the latest entry in their series of business communications platform solutions. In a nutshell, Microsoft Exchange provides an email and communications solution for your business, and can be hosted either onsite, or offsite through "cloud computing".
While the new version of Exchange offers a variety of back-end changes that will please your IT department, what are the tangible benefits to you, and your small business?
We wanted to provide you with a few of the most notable features of Exchange 2010:
New-look Outlook Web App: In previous versions of Exchange, the web app was a fairly "bare bones" version of your email, while your regular Outlook was much more functional. Microsoft has completely revamped the web app in 2010, bringing it much more in line with the Outlook experience you're used to.
Revamped Outlook Web App now completely functional with Firefox and Safari: Previously, Firefox users were only able to view a "lite" version of the web app. Not so with Exchange 2010! Firefox and Safari users now have full access to the Outlook Web App, which is fantastic for offices with different types of computers, or for your employees who want to check their email from home or abroad.
Role-based access control: This is a complicated way of saying that the permissions for Exchange 2010 are now much more scalable. So instead of having to call up your help desk for every little thing you need, you can have partial access to make the changes you need (like adding new inboxes, archiving your emails, etc.), while still leaving help desk the more "high level" tasks. Microsoft's website estimates that this will lower operational costs 15-20% by reducing the burden on your company's IT department.
Better inbox management: Exchange 2010 contains new features to track your emails much more easily. This includes a new conversation view, which allows you to arrange messages into threads, and "MailTips", which alerts you to potential issues with the email you're sending out (issues that could render it undeliverable).
In addition, there are some new features your IT team will be very excited about, such as:
- More powerful archiving tools
- Much more optimized software - Exchange 2010 provides 70% less disk I/O over Exchange 2007, which means it's much less of a burden on servers
- More powerful backup and recovery tool
Spirinet provides Exchange Hosting and IT Outsourcing for small and medium businesses nationwide.
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