Is Microsoft Exchange The Right Answer For Your Firm?

As firms continue to change their technology to the latest Microsoft Server 2003, Windows SBS Server 2003, Novell NetWare or Linux operating systems, frequent questions asked are these: Should I use Microsoft Exchange 2003? What are the alternatives?

Exchange is the Microsoft server add-on that handles e-mail, shared calendars, shared contacts and to-do lists. The shared contacts and shared calendar function is a convenient place to store all general contact information for your firm. The trick with the shared contacts is keeping them synchronized with other sources of name, address and phone numbers throughout your firm. Over time, this will get better as vendors like CCH, Thompson, Intuit and others make the integration into their systems tight and synchronized with Exchange and Outlook. But for now, the promise of integration is only beginning to work. In the meantime, what are the benefits of integration that come from implementing an Exchange server?

E-mail. First, Exchange servers may simplify the way you use e-mail. E-mail for an Exchange server is stored for the longer term so you have a history of the e-mail sent and received by the firm stored in a central place ' the Exchange server itself. If you are using an outside service for e-mail, particularly for POP3 Internet e-mail, the e-mail is only stored on the local hard drives of the users of POP3 e-mail, which is risky since e-mail could be lost. Exchange keeps a complete history of e-mail on the server and allows a user to replicate this e-mail to their local workstation. The benefits of this approach are that you can work from your home, a client's office or from the road and have a complete history of e-mail available. Additional advantages include the ability to work from different machines or from a web browser using Outlook Web Access (OWA) as your mail client. The disadvantages are that the synchronization to a local desktop running Office 2003 to the server can be slow, and greater communication speed is required to run Exchange/Outlook than running a POP3 e-mail account with Outlook Express. Furthermore, you have additional licensing fees as outlined below.

Calendar. Second, Exchange servers may simplify the way you use a calendar. The key benefit to an Exchange server in this area is that you can coordinate your calendar with others for events where you all must participate. If you want to schedule a meeting with another partner, and use a couple of other resources like a conference room and a projector, you can search for all of these resources in Microsoft Outlook, and the schedule for all of these resources is maintained on the Exchange server. The Exchange server does the heavy work of storing and coordinating these schedules back to the end user's computer.

To-do lists. Third, Exchange servers may simplify the way you keep your to-do lists. Besides having a local copy of items that you need to do, you can use the shared to-do list functions of Exchange to delegate items that need to be completed. These items are automatically added to the to-do lists of other people and may be added to their schedule as well.

Integration. Finally, Exchange is often used as the integration tool by vendors to extract or add client names, addresses and events to your calendar. Microsoft has published the standards for programmers to use to help them create and add, or to extract and use, the key information of contacts, to-do items and calendar events. Vendors like CCH, Intuit, Thomson and others are using such functionality to integrate with their own products.
The key downsides to the firm are costs and the requirements to run Exchange properly.

First, we recommend that a completely separate server from the file and print server be added and maintained to be used by Exchange. This is particularly true with larger firms. We are hesitant to say it is all right to use Exchange as an application on the file server unless you have 10 users or less. We would still prefer a separate server for reliability and speed.

Second, this server needs to be set up by a technician that knows what he is doing. Even if you have an in-house technician, installation of the Exchange server should be contracted to an outside IT consulting firm that knows how to properly set up and configure an Exchange server.

Third, you need to realize that Exchange is a very popular hacker target. You will want to protect the Exchange server by adding an Internet appliance to filter out virus attacks and spam, such as the DoubleCheck server, or to add more software (and more overhead), such as Norton Corporate Anti-virus and firewall. You'll want to add these to the Exchange server to protect it from outside attacks. Finally, licensing costs for Exchange Client Access Licenses need to be considered.

How much does it cost for Exchange? Well, first you must have an adequate server. If this is a separate server, it should be your most powerful machine in the organization and be configured for reliability. Xeon processors, 2GB to 4GB of RAM, 15,000RPM RAID drives, redundant power supplies, and battery backup write cache enablers would be common. Expect properly configured Exchange server hardware costs to be $5,000 to $7,000.

Exchange Server software can be obtained one of three ways:

1. Included as part of Windows SBS Server 2003 Premium edition ' the best way for small firms,

2. With Windows server standard edition and an Exchange server ' around $2,500, or

3. As part of a cluster of two or more Exchange servers for reliability using Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server Enterprise Edition ' around $7,000 for software per server.

Exchange Client Access Licenses (CALs) will commonly be $100 each. The CALs can be used with different versions of Microsoft Office, but you will have the best results if you are on the 2003 (current) version of Office. If you have not been upgrading Microsoft Office, you will have additional expenses. Finally, to install Exchange server, your consulting group will likely need between four to 20 hours at their labor rate.

What about competitors? Microsoft would simply state that there are no competitors, and for many features of Exchange, that would be true. Your best alternatives today are Novell's SUSE Linux Exchange, Novell's GroupWise and Lotus Notes Mail. All of these products do not integrate as well with Microsoft Outlook, but all of them have features to integrate e-mail, calendar and to-do functions and to use Outlook. Remember that outsourcing your Exchange server functions can be done with a service like www.myhosting.com, and this may be your least cost approach of implementing Microsoft Exchange.

The benefits of using Exchange are frequently judged to be worth the extra effort and money to implement a shared calendar, to-do list and for long-term e-mail storage. Having an Exchange server available is definitely a productivity improvement and a convenience. With our dependency on e-mail, and the complexity of our calendars, having Exchange available can be a real benefit to the firm.

Randy Johnston is executive vice president and partner of K2 Enterprises and Network Management Group, Inc. He is a nationally recognized educator, consultant and writer with over 30 years experience in strategic technology planning, systems and network integration, accounting software selection, business development and management, disaster recovery and contingency planning, and process engineering.