Introducing Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server, as the name denotes, is software that enables you to communicate with others across network. You can also send and receive e-mails because of its interoperability with e-mail client applications.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 comes with two editions, Standard edition and Enterprise edition. The standard edition of Microsoft Exchange Server is developed for small and medium-scale enterprises for messaging functionality. The storage capacity is 16 GB. The enterprise edition, on the other hand, is designed for big organizations. This edition creates multiple groups and databases and has storage capacity of 8 terabyte.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 has features that include:

• Intelligent message filter: Built-in feature that is used to filter server-side junk e-mail messages. This feature uses Microsoft SmartScreen technology to efficiently block unwanted e-mail messages. This feature is also used in Outlook 2003 for client-side filtering.

• Inter-organization replication tool: Used to copy or replicate free and busy information and the contents of the public folders between the organizations using Exchange server. This tool is extremely useful for the large enterprises that want to share confidential information to each other.

• Mail box recovery center: allows you to reconnect multiple mailboxes to the correct user in Active Directory directory service. This feature helps you when suddenly due to any virus attacks you lose all your e-mail messages. You can even scan the mailbox database, automatically match user mailboxes to user accounts in Active Directory, recover individual or multiple mailboxes, and identify conflicts.

• Volume Shadow copy service: Allows you to quickly create backup and restore e-mail messages. This is possible because another copy of the database already exists and can be used at any time for restore processes.

• Auto accept agent: this is a tool in Microsoft Exchange Server that enables you to automatically manage meeting schedules requests, cancellation, and updates and creates responses to the meeting organizer.

Thus, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 helps increase the employee productivity and at the same time help organizations reduce their total cost of ownership in areas such as server and site consolidation.