Exchange is a computer server that stores your company’s email, calendars, address books and files centrally, so they are available 24x7 and can be shared among your team, if you wish. People running Exchange as their email server typically use Microsoft Outlook 2003 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 e-mail 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.

To help you understand the productivity-boosting options that Exchange offers, here is a comparison of Outlook/Exchange 2003 versus basic email options:

		Exchange Server	POP3 (iMail)
	Group scheduling	YES	NO
	Send out meeting requests, then track and update them	YES	NO
	Shared calendars and side-by-side calendar views	YES	NO
	Access to personal and shared address books from remote locations	YES	NO
	Outlook single sign-on for email and network access	YES	NO
	Outlook connections over the Internet are secure	YES	NO
	Server-side spam filtering	YES	YES
	Put multicolored flags next to emails as a reminder to follow up	YES	NO
	Ability to add voting buttons to a messages	YES	NO
	Automatic out-of-office reply	YES	NO
	Ability to recall sent messages	YES	NO
	Support for multiple-computer access	YES	YES
	Access to email via Web browsers and mobile browsers, Outlook Mobile in Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs, Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphones	YES	Partial
	Outlook Cached Exchange Mode for working with intermittent Web connection (eg dial-up)	YES	NO
	Offline email, calendar, contacts, and public folder support	YES	NO
	Access to public folders for sharing documents and information	YES	NO
	Basic email support for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4	YES	NO
	Easy management of Outlook and Exchange Server profiles across multiple machines to lower support costs	YES	NO

blackberry

Running a BlackBerry Enterprise Server is difficult and expensive – so leave it to the experts. Our hosted Exchange includes an instant BlackBerry option, where you pay a low monthly fee and we handle everything, so it just works. You get BlackBerry service fully integrated with your company’s Exchange email, with zero management or upfront costs required.

ARCHIVING

We offer the ability to ‘turn on’ archiving instantly. You can choose either basic archiving, which simply keeps a mirrored copy of your data, or advanced archiving, which keeps an offsite copy of all data and ensures the archive is compliant with major financial, healthcare and other regulations.

Disk space

With our fully-managed hosted Exchange service, there is no need for complex hardware upgrades and downtime. As your company mailboxes grow larger in size, just add extra capacity instantly for a low monthly fee.