The staff is extremely professional and knowledgeable; the services of Boost Technologies have been invaluable to us and I recommend them very highly.

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Boston Area Investment Firm

Utilizing the Managed Services program through Boost allows us to not worry about our infrastructure… at all.

Chief Financial Officer,
Boston Area Investment Firm

    Why use Microsoft Exchange?

    Most small and mid-sized businesses are using email as a primary communication channel with customers, colleagues and suppliers. But many of these companies stop there, missing out on productivity-boosting features like shared calendars, contact information and files.

    By upgrading to the world’s most popular business messaging software, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, you can significantly raise your team’s efficiency for a small monthly fee.

    Basically, 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. It is the messaging system of choice for most Fortune 500 corporations.

    Advanced Features

    People running Exchange as their email server typically use Microsoft Outlook 2007 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 email 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.

    Outlook/Exchange 2007 vs Basic Email

    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 2007 POP3 / IMAP4
    Group scheduling yes yes
    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 Some solutions
    Server-side spam filtering yes Some solutions
    Put multicolored flags next to emails as a reminder to follow up yes Partial
    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 Partial
    Access to email via Web browsers and mobile browsers, Outlook Mobile in Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs, Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphones yes Non-Microsoft products are typically required
    Outlook Cached Exchange Mode for working with intermittent Web connection (eg dial-up) yes Some solutions offer caching
    Offline email, calendar, contacts, and public folder support yes Partial
    Access to public folders for sharing documents and information yes Individual email folder access in IMAP
    Basic email support for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 yes yes
    Easy management of Outlook and Exchange Server profiles across multiple machines to lower support costs yes no

    Last update on 2012-01-26 by Jeremy Bisbo.

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