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 2010, 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 24×7 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 2007 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 2007/EXCHANGE 2010 vs BASIC EMAIL
To help you understand the productivity-boosting options that Exchange offers, here is a comparison of Outlook/Exchange 2007 versus basic email options:
