Is Microsoft Exchange The Right Answer For Your Firm?

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• January-March 2005 Issue
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As firms continue to change their technology to the latest Microsoft Server 2003, Windows SBS Server 2003, Novell NetWare or Linux operating systems, frequent questions asked are these: Should I use Microsoft Exchange 2003? What are the alternatives?

Exchange is the Microsoft server add-on that handles e-mail, shared calendars, shared contacts and to-do lists. The shared contacts and shared calendar function is a convenient place to store all general contact information for your firm. The trick with the shared contacts is keeping them synchronized with other sources of name, address and phone numbers throughout your firm. Over time, this will get better as vendors like CCH, Thompson, Intuit and others make the integration into their systems tight and synchronized with Exchange and Outlook. But for now, the promise of integration is only beginning to work. In the meantime, what are the benefits of integration that come from implementing an Exchange server?

E-mail. First, Exchange servers may simplify the way you use e-mail. E-mail for an Exchange server is stored for the longer term so you have a history of the e-mail sent and received by the firm stored in a central place ' the Exchange server itself. If you are using an outside service for e-mail, particularly for POP3 Internet e-mail, the e-mail is only stored on the local hard drives of the users of POP3 e-mail, which is risky since e-mail could be lost. Exchange keeps a complete history of e-mail on the server and allows a user to replicate this e-mail to their local workstation. The benefits of this approach are that you can work from your home, a client's office or from the road and have a complete history of e-mail available. Additional advantages include the ability to work from different machines or from a web browser using Outlook Web Access (OWA) as your mail client. The disadvantages are that the synchronization to a local desktop running Office 2003 to the server can be slow, and greater communication speed is required to run Exchange/Outlook than running a POP3 e-mail account with Outlook Express. Furthermore, you have additional licensing fees as outlined below.

Calendar. Second, Exchange servers may simplify the way you use a calendar. The key benefit to an Exchange server in this area is that you can coordinate your calendar with others for events where you all must participate. If you want to schedule a meeting with another partner, and use a couple of other resources like a conference room and a projector, you can search for all of these resources in Microsoft Outlook, and the schedule for all of these resources is maintained on the Exchange server. The Exchange server does the heavy work of storing and coordinating these schedules back to the end user's computer.

To-do lists. Third, Exchange servers may simplify the way you keep your to-do lists. Besides having a local copy of items that you need to do, you can use the shared to-do list functions of Exchange to delegate items that need to be completed. These items are automatically added to the to-do lists of other people and may be added to their schedule as well.

Integration. Finally, Exchange is often used as the integration tool by vendors to extract or add client names, addresses and events to your calendar. Microsoft has published the standards for programmers to use to help them create and add, or to extract and use, the key information of contacts, to-do items and calendar events. Vendors like CCH, Intuit, Thomson and others are using such functionality to integrate with their own products.
The key downsides to the firm are costs and the requirements to run Exchange properly.

First, we recommend that a completely separate server from the file and print server be added and maintained to be used by Exchange. This is particularly true with larger firms. We are hesitant to say it is all right to use Exchange as an application on the file server unless you have 10 users or less. We would still prefer a separate server for reliability and speed.