Why Choose Hosted Exchange?
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Why Choose Hosted Exchange?
Hosted Exchange allows you to offer comprehensive messaging services for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), small office/home office (SOHO) businesses, and individual consumers. Based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003, this messaging solution provides tools for flexible business modeling. You can offer a broad range of services that go from basic e-mail up to higher value services, such as providing additional storage, hosting personal domains, and calendars.
Exchange Server 2007 brings a rich set of new technologies, features, and services to this release of the solution. Exchange Server 2007 is designed to be a flexible messaging solution for customers of all sizes, and has been re-engineered to improve the administrative and management experience by using new server roles that align with how messaging systems are typically deployed and distributed across an organization.
The following table provides more details about new features in Hosted Exchange for this release.
Table: New Hosted Exchange Features
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Server roles | One of the primary new concepts introduced in Exchange Server 2007 is that of server roles. Instead of one generic installation of Exchange Server, you can now choose from several different roles. These roles are designed to logically group the features that are required to accomplish a set of tasks. The Exchange Server 2007 server roles are Hub Transport, Edge Transport, Client Access, Mailbox, and Unified Messaging. |
| Unified Messaging | Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging-enabled users can receive all voice mail, e-mail, and fax messages in their Exchange Server 2007 mailboxes and can access their mailboxes from a variety of devices. These devices include mobile devices and cellular, analog, or digital telephones. |
| Mobility | Exchange Server 2007 offers a significantly improved Microsoft Outlook user experience on mobile devices. It also includes improved security and better mobile device management. |
| Anti-spam and antivirus functions | Exchange Server 2007 includes many improvements to antivirus protection. In addition to continued support of the Virus Scanning API (VSAPI), Microsoft has made a significant investment in more effective, efficient, and programmable virus scanning at the transport level. Exchange Server 2007 introduces the concept of transport agents. Agents are managed software components that perform a task in response to an application event. Agents act on transport events, much like event sinks in earlier versions of Exchange. Third-party developers can write customized agents to take advantage of the underlying Exchange MIME parsing engine for robust transport-level antivirus scanning. The Exchange Server 2007 MIME parsing engine, developed and evolved through many years of MIME-handling exposure, is likely the most trusted and robust MIME engine in the industry. Another antivirus improvement is the implementation of attachment filtering by a transport agent. By running attachment filtering on the Edge Transport server role, you can reduce the spread of malware attachments before they enter an organization. |
| New administration functionality | The Exchange Management Shell, built on Microsoft Windows PowerShell technology, provides administrators a powerful command-line interface that they can use to administer Exchange Server 2007. With the Exchange Management Shell, administrators can manage every aspect of Exchange Server 2007. The Exchange Management Shell provides great flexibility because it uses an object model to interact with the Exchange system that is based on the Microsoft .NET platform. This object model enables the shell commands to apply the output from one command to subsequent commands when they are run. |
| Outlook Web Access | Outlook Web Access has been redesigned to enhance the end-user experience and productivity. Outlook Web Access includes many new features and improvements that are not found in earlier versions of Microsoft Exchange. Features such as smart meeting booking, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Windows file shares integration, and the ability to manage mobile devices are now available. Outlook Web Access also includes improvements in search, reminders, the Outlook Web Access address book, and other messaging options. |
| Performance improvements | Exchange Serer 2007 supports deployment on a 64-bit architecture for improved performance and capacity. Because of the move from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture, the Enterprise Edition of Exchange Server 2007 now supports a larger number of storage groups and databases per server. Exchange Server 2007 lets you create as many as 50 storage groups per server. |
| High availability | Exchange Server 2007 includes three Inbox features that provide high availability for mailbox servers: Local continuous replication (LCR), cluster continuous replication (CCR), and single copy clusters (SCC). The continuous replication features use log shipping to create a second copy of a production storage group. In an LCR environment, the second copy is located on the same server as the production storage group. In a CCR environment, the second copy is located on the passive node in the cluster. |
For more information see: