Exchange 2010 Upgrade Benefits

Exchange 2010 Upgrade Benefits

New Features

Continuous replication

Companies lose a great amount on even an hour to email downtime. Exchange 2010 enables continuous replication of data, which can minimize disruptions dramatically and spare organizations from such loss. Microsoft reckons the costs of deploying Exchange 2010 can be recouped within six months thanks in part to the improvements in business continuity.

Virtualization

Exchange 2010 supports virtualization, allowing consolidation. Server virtualization is not only a cost cutter, reducing expenditure related to maintenance, support staff, power, cooling, and space. It also improves business continuity — when a virtual machine is down, computers can run on another virtual machine with no downtime.

Larger mailboxes

Coupling the ability to use larger, slower SATA (or SAS) disks with changes to the underlying mailbox database architecture means that far larger mailbox sizes will become the norm.

Voicemail transcription

Unified Messaging, offers the concept of the “universal inbox,” where email and voice mail are available from a single location and consequently accessed from any of the following clients:

·         Outlook 2007 and later

·         Outlook Web App

·         Outlook Voice Access — access from any phone

·         Windows Mobile 6.5 or later devices

A new feature to Exchange 2010, Voicemail Preview, sees text-transcripts of voicemails being received, saving the time it takes to listen to the message. Upon reception of a voice message, the receiver can glance at the preview and decide whether it is an urgent matter. This and other improvements, such as managing voice and email from a single directory (using AD), offer the opportunity to discard third-party voicemail solutions in favor of Exchange 2010.

High Availability

Exchange 2010 builds upon the continuous replication technologies. The technology is far simpler to deploy than Exchange 2007, as the complexities of a cluster install are taken away from the administrator. It incorporates easily with existing mailbox servers and offers protection at the database — with Database Availability Groups - rather than the server level. By supporting automatic failover, this feature allows faster recovery times than previously.

Legal Risk Mitigation.

Exchange 2010 adds retention management policies, legal hold Functionality, and multi-mailbox search capabilities. Exchange Administrators can set retention policies that can be applied to specific items, conversations, or folders in a mailbox and information workers can set simple policies for deletion and archiving as well. Exchange 2010 also now enables legal hold, preserving mailbox items in both primary mailboxes and Personal Archives when appropriate for litigation needs. The release also supports new Web-based, multi-mailbox search that can be delegated to specialist users, such as compliance officers, to help meet eDiscovery, regulatory, and other requirements.

Easier calendar sharing

With Federation for Exchange 2010, employees can share calendars and distribution lists with external recipients more easily. The application allows them to schedule meetings with partners and customers as if they belonged to the same organization. This might not appeal to every organization, but those investing in collaboration technologies will see the value Exchange 2010 offers.

Business Benefits

Cost savings on storage

Exchange 2010 has, according to Microsoft, 70% less disk I/O (input/output) than Exchange 2003. For this reason, the firm recommends moving away from SAN storage solutions and adopting less expensive direct attached storage. This translates to real and significant cost savings for most businesses.

Help desk cost reduction

Exchange 2010 offers potential to reduce help desk costs by enabling users to perform common tasks that would normally require a help desk call. Role-based Access control (RBAC) allows delegation based on job function which, coupled with the Web-based Exchange Control Panel (ECP), enables users to assume responsibility for distribution lists, update personal information held in AD, and track messages. This reduces the call volumes placed on the help desk, with obvious financial benefits.

Native archiving

A large hole in previous Exchange offerings was the lack of a native managed archive solution. This saw either the proliferation of unmanaged PSTs or the expense of deploying third-party solutions. With the advent of Exchange 2010 — and in particular the upcoming arrival of SP1 this year — a basic archiving suite is now available out-of-the-box.

Running on-premise or in the cloud

Exchange 2010 offers organizations the option to run Exchange on-premise or in the cloud. This approach even allows organizations to run some mailboxes in the cloud and some on locally held Exchange resources. This offers companies very competitive rates for mailbox provision from cloud providers for key mailboxes, whilst deciding how much control to relinquish by still hosting most mailboxes on local servers.