It is difficult to overstate the importance of e-mail as a business communication tool. It rivals — in many organizations, surpasses — the telephone as the primary means for interacting and exchanging ideas and information with colleagues, partners and customers.
Recently, however, there has been some debate about the best way to implement e-mail. Does it make more sense to install the e-mail architecture locally, or does a cloud-based, hosted solution make more sense?
The latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server, the longstanding kingpin of enterprise e-mail architecture, makes the debate moot. With Exchange Server 2010, organizations have the ability to execute either a local or a cloud implementation — or even a hybrid of the two.
Exchange 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products, and it is the first server in a new generation of Microsoft server technology built from the ground up to work both on-premises and as an online service. Designed, developed and tested with the Microsoft Software-plus-Services strategy at its core, Exchange 2010 will allow organizations to choose when and how to take advantage of on-premises, hosted, cloud-based and hybrid solutions without interrupting or changing the experience for end-users.
This flexibility can result in improved operational efficiency and reduced costs. In a recent study commissioned by Microsoft, the research firm Forrester Consulting determined that early adopters of Exchange 2010 have realized benefits such as cost avoidance of storage, reduced cost of high availability, cost avoidance in voicemail, savings in backup systems, fewer help desk calls, cost avoidance of mobility, enhanced communication security, and simplified compliance and legal discovery. Furthermore, Forrester calculated a three-year, risk-adjusted ROI of 48 percent with a payback period of less than six months.
In addition to increasing operational and deployment flexibility, Exchange 2010 helps companies reduce operating costs and administrative overhead. Role-based access control simplifies administration by enabling IT staff to delegate tasks to responsible users in a controlled way. For instance, IT staff could delegate privileges to human resources for updating employee information, give legal the ability to conduct e-mail auditing and allow employees to create their own distribution lists.
E-mail systems typically require a significant amount of storage, but Exchange 2010 adds support for a wider range of storage hardware, thus increasing the ability to deploy large mailboxes without impacting hardware budgets. Exchange 2010 further improves performance against lower-cost direct-attached storage, enabling organizations to reduce storage costs by up to 85 percent without sacrificing performance or reliability.
E-mail reliability is critical for most organizations — if e-mail is down, business grinds to a halt. Exchange 2010 provides a simplified approach to high availability and disaster recovery by maintaining up to 16 copies of the data and can provide automatic recovery from a variety of failures. A database-level disruption, such as a disk failure, no longer affects all the users on a server, which coupled with faster failover times (30 seconds) dramatically improves an organization’s overall uptime.
Enhanced maintenance tools also reduce downtime. Exchange 2010 eliminates the need to take users offline while moving mailboxes between servers, thereby increasing productivity and minimizing server downtime. Transport servers have built-in redundancy to protect against the loss of messages in transit. These two items combined allow maintenance to take place anytime, even during business hours.
As e-mail volume grows, companies must address increasing compliance, legal and e-discovery concerns. However, only 28 percent of organizations currently archive their e-mail content, according to Osterman Research. Exchange 2010 introduces an integrated e-mail archive that makes it easier to store and query e-mail across the organization using the Exchange software that organizations already know and use. Exchange 2010 also enables organizations to move Outlook data files (PSTs) to an integrated archive while maintaining a consistent user experience.
Several other built-in features simplify the prevention of information or security leaks, making it easier to maintain corporate and regulatory compliance. Tools such as the cross-mailbox search interface enable compliance officers and human resources representatives to conduct searches based on selected e-mail attributes across the entire mail infrastructure.
New tools also make it easier to ensure communication confidentiality. Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) policies can now be set centrally by IT staff, to automatically help protect messages based on sender, subject, content or other specified attributes. RMS restricts recipients’ ability to view, print or forward protected e-mail. Users can easily view and compose RMS-protected messages in Outlook and Outlook Web App as well as on mobile devices and can instantly protect messages using “one-click” encryption.
Basex Inc. recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary interruptions, including those from e-mail. The firm also estimates that the average number of corporate e-mail messages received per person per day is expected to reach more than 93 in 2010. Exchange 2010 introduces new features to help people better manage inbox overload and be more productive. These features include:
Exchange 2010 provides organizations with new levels of reliability and performance by simplifying administration and deployment, it helps protect communications and it delivers new tools that enable users to better manage their inboxes. Exchange 2010 helps ensure that people stay connected with each other no matter where they are, what device they use, or whether they rely on an on-premises server or an online service.
