With Exchange Server you can enjoy the full functionality of Microsoft Outlook. Between Exchange and Outlook, Junk mail is filtered either by add-ons to Exchange or by Outlook itself. This means you spend more time managing important e-mails rather than dealing with spam.
The new system enables greater levels of collaboration as you can book meetings with your colleagues while looking at their diaries, so you will know when you book them that they do not have a meeting booked, this even includes any group calendars held on the intranet site such as the holiday calendar.
Managing actions and agendas around meetings is also much easier as an automatic storage area is created on the SharePoint intranet that holds agendas, actions and other documents from the meeting.
Outlook lets you easily manage your contacts so you have them available to you whether you are working in the office, on the road or on your phone. Should someone else need access to your contacts, you can easily accommodate this.
Accessing yours and others up-to-minute e-mail, calendar or contacts from Outlook when out and about used to require the setting up of a "VPN", which some organisations found tedious to manage. This is no longer required and Outlook can connect to your server as if you were in the Office, wherever you are sitting, even wirelessly from an airport lounge, providing you have a wireless network card in your PC.
Exchange works with Outlook 2007 which has new features that enhance working and include:
- A to-do bar added to the shell UI that shows a snapshot of the user's upcoming appointments and active tasks for better time and project management.
- Improved calendar views that display the tasks due below each day on the week view and supports overlaying multiple calendars.
- Integrated RSS aggregator
- 'Instant Search' through a context indexer based search engine with Windows Desktop Search
- Enhanced integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server
- New programmability features
- Ability to publish calendars in Internet Calendar format to Microsoft Office Online
Note Small Business Server only comes with Exchange 2003.
