Microsoft Exchange is Microsoft’s premier email platform. Just about all business’s today use email. Exchange is a very feature rich easy to manage, cost effective solution to email. It gives you the ability to manage email, calendars, and contacts from almost any client platform out there.

This article describes a few of the advantages of Microsoft’s new Exchange Server, version 2010.

The first major advantage is Disaster Recovery. In Exchange 2007 you have the ability to have a real-time mirror backup of your email server on a second server. In Exchange 2010 you can have up to 16 real-time Mirrors at once. An example would be you could have your email server in New Orleans backed up to Houston and Dallas in real-time. When living in a Hurricane zone this is very helpful.

Second as a manager of Information Technology for clients, I am always battling with users on how big their mailboxes have become. I have one user who has over 160,000 emails in their email box. This can cause major issues with speed. It can take up to 20 min sometimes to open outlook. So to fix this problem in the past I would have to create archive accounts on the server. I would then have to manually move emails to that account. Exchange 2010 has built in archiving. So after email gets to a specific age it archives the email. With outlook 2010 it’s a few clicks to access that archive. It helps limit the amount of time I spend moving emails around and saves my clients money.

Third, mobile phones are part of our everyday life. Exchange 2010 now adds support for text messaging so when you revive a text, you can also receive it in outlook. One of the major advantages of this is if you switch phones all your texts, email, and contacts will move to the new device. Also you can now look at other contacts and calendars from your windows mobile device. You no longer have to start up your laptop to see if a co-worker is free that day.