With the release of Exchange 2010, Microsoft has advanced its messaging capabilities to new levels of functionality and capability. Of course, it provides the same basic functions and reliability as earlier versions (messaging, group scheduling, tasks), but adds additional power to make it even better, not only for administrators but, more importantly, for users.
Exchange 2010 Key Benefits
- Improve user productivity by making it easier to view message threads as conversations, by allowing them to ‘opt out’ of irrelevant conversations, by enhancing the way they create and review meeting requests and giving them a web tool which is functionally similar to the full desktop client.
- Manage communications more effectively by providing speech-to-text conversion of voicemail messages, by showing users when they are sending externally or to a very large distribution group through the use of MailTips and linking with remote organisations for calendar sharing.
- Configure systems that are highly available through the new Database Availability Group functionality that allows an Exchange database to be mirrored to one or more servers, local or remote, such that recovery from a database or systems failure can be as fast as 30 seconds.
Exchange 2010 Capabilities
- High Availability - Database-level high availability capability can reduce unplanned downtime significantly when compared to previous versions of Exchange.
- Outlook Client - Now featuring the Office Ribbon for the same look and feel as other Office applications.
- Outlook Web App - Provides a web access option that is virtually the same as the Outlook client, including context-sensitive right click menus.
- MailTips - When sending messages, provides users with real-time information about how many people are in a distribution list, whether a message is being sent externally, any recipient out-of-office messages and more.
- Out of Office - Schedule on and off times for out-of-office messages and send different messages internally and externally.
- Centralised Rules - Add central disclaimers, footer messages, re-route and moderate messages through the use of transport rules.
- Federation - Integrate with other organisations’ Exchange 2010 to enable rich calendar sharing and meeting functionality.
Next Steps
If you would like to find out more information about how Silversands can help you please email info@silversands.co.uk or contact us