Microsoft Exchange

Exchange is Microsoft’s “Messaging and Collaboration” server. In plain English, Exchange is the server which an office can use to receive e-mail and share address books and schedules with each other. It is quite possibly the single best product offered by Microsoft, and the one that works most reliably.

Most people think of e-mail in the POP3 dial-up ISP model. They open up their e-mail program and “download” messages from the internet to Outlook Express or Mail.app. Of course anyone who has tried to use the same e-mail address from the office and from home knows the great limiting factor. If you download a message at the office, you won’t have access to it at home or vice-versa. There have been several “hacks” over the years to try and get around this, the most notable one being “leave a copy of mail on server”. But here you are forced to sort through mail that you may or may not have read, and you do not have access to messages to may have already sent, or that you were in the process of writing. The final great downside to this style of e-mail is that you must have an e-mail program configured for each place you may want to get you mail. For most business professionals this turns out to be 3 places, office, home, laptop.

One way of addressing these problems has been the rise of wed based e-mail, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, and gmail.com. While these fix most of the problems with the POP3 model, they still have a few serious drawbacks. Chief of which is that they are not corporate e-mail systems. You lose the professional face of joe.user@mycompany.com in favor of finding an awkward e-mail address with the service, juser-mycomp1977@gmail.com. I cannot over state how deeply unprofessional it is for me to get a business card with an “@aol.com”, or “@gmail.com” address. There are again “hacks” to make web based systems look more corporate, but these systems are still “single user” and thus sharing your data across the office is not easily done.

Enter Microsoft Exchange. Exchange has solved the problem of multiple locations (work, home, road), and the problem of installed software (Exchange can be accessed from either Outlook or via a web browser). Exchange also has the advantage of being a corporate e-mail system (i.e. @mycompany.com), and allowing each user of the server to share out his or her address book and schedule so that other people in the office know what’s going on. Except for answering the phone, it’s about the only communication service/server you will ever need.

Exchange also has a mobile e-mail access feature which is exactly like ubiquitous Blackberry, but without the ridiculous Blackberry costs. Microsoft calls this “Push Email”. A message sent to joe.user@mycompany.com not only shows up in Joes Outlook Inbox, but also a copy is sent to his Windows Mobile Phone. If he reads the e-mail on his phone, the message is marked as read when he sits down at his computer. If he replies to the e-mail from his phone, then the reply is also in his Outlook folders for him to refer back to.

In fact it is the sync of Exchange that is its greatest virtue. No mater were you use it from, Mobile, Outlook, Office, Home, or via the Web, it always looks the same, has the same messages, and the same read/not-read statuses. The Contacts and Calendars are the same. In fact address books and schedules are automatically synced to your cell phone over the air. This means that if you enter an address in Outlook it will be on your phone (no more tying to type in a name and number of the keypad). If you run into someone and schedule a meeting while waiting in line at the post office, you can put that meeting right into your cell phone and then it will show up at the office. No need to plug in your phone to your computer, it just works.

Exchange is not at all expensive. A typical small office can have all of the virtues of exchange, for less than $1500. There are some additional “data plan” coasts from the cell phone provider if you want to use Push e-mail, but those are only $10 to $15 a month depending on carrier, where Blackberry services can be $50 per-month in total or more. Of course your office will also have to have internet access via broadband.