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April 2, 2009 -- I'm taking two clients in different directions with their email systems. The first, a small business, has Small Business Server, which comes with Exchange loaded by default. I used and liked Exchange at a foundation where I was IT Director, so I simply installed it when I set up their new server. The second organization, a non-profit, has been relying on their web host for email services. Staff uses Outlook on their computers and download email from the host's Internet email service. The email systems are wrong for both of them, so I will be moving each of them to something different.
The non-profit is a no-brainer. This organization has about 70 employees in three (soon-to-be four) locations. A number of the staff work regularly at several locations. The Executive Director, of late, has been spending a lot of time with funding organizations and is away from the office for days at a time. Coordination and setting up meetings is difficult and time consuming. Employees use Outlook at their desks and web-mail when they are away from their offices, which works okay. However, once email is downloaded, it's gone from the email system, and users cannot see it on web-mail. Also, if you send mail via your web-mail account, you cannot see it in your computer's email program.
Exchange solves all of these problems. With an Exchange system, your email is kept on the server until you delete it. The Outlook email program synchronizes with the server, so that email is on both your computer and the server. The President of the foundation I previously worked for used to take care of a lot of his email on his laptop on airline flights (before they had Internet connections). He would compose new emails and replies to ones he had received while in the air. When he landed he would connect remotely to our Exchange server, retrieve new incoming email and send his outgoing email.
Exchange also has a web-mail feature (Outlook Web Access) to get and send email when you are away from your computes. A nice thing about Exchange's web-mail feature is that it looks very much like the Outlook email, so you're in familiar territory even when you're not at your computer. Oh, and did I mention, Exchange works with most PDA's?
That's all nice, but a major payoff for this organization will be in coordination. Right now, setting up meetings can be a nightmare. Can you and you and you and you . . . make it next Thursday. Oh, you can't. Well, everyone, how about the following Tuesday? You get the picture. So, Outlook does have a calendar -- I sync it with my Treo -- but, calendars are a dime a dozen. So, here's what's nice: When you are setting up a meeting in Outlook attached to an Exchange server, you can see the busy status of everyone you want to invite. You can't see what other people are doing, but you do know when they are free. Doesn't that make setting up meetings easy?
And it has other stuff, like public folders, where you can store documents (like forms) that people need to have access to on a regular, or not-so-regular, basis. I could go on.
Now, for the small business using Exchange: They have three people in the entire company who get email at a company address. They only use Exchange for email (making appointments is pretty easy -- "Hey, Joe, you got a minute?"). Since Exchange comes with Small Business Server, there's no harm in using it, right?
To start, it does use server resources. In general, this is not an issue, but the CFO only works in the office 4 days a week and one VP does a lot of work on the weekends. They want to be able to run some programs remotely and those programs are now on the server. However, users are complaining that sometimes the server gets slow. In addition, an Exchange server requires ongoing maintenance, which takes time and costs money. On the other hand, getting three email accounts is very cheap. So, I will switch them to an Internet email service that will serve their needs just fine.
I think both organizations will be better off. Does your email solution fit your needs?
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