Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is a messaging and collaborative software product developed by Microsoft. It is a part of their Windows Server System line of server products. The use of Microsoft Exchange Server is very widespread in large corporations using Microsoft infrastructure solutions. Among other things, Microsoft Exchange Server manages electronic mail, shared calendars and tasks, provides full support for mobile and web-based access to information, and can support very large amounts of data storage. It is positioned as a rival to the Lotus Notes / Domino server from IBM and competes with a number of competitors such as Scalix, Open-Xchange and exchange4linux.

The current version of Microsoft Exchange Server is 2003 SP2. It can be run on Windows 2000 Server (only if Service Pack 4 is first installed) and Windows Server 2003, although some new features only work with the latter. Like Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 has many compatibility modes to allow users to slowly migrate to the new system. This is useful in large companies with distributed Exchange environments who cannot afford the downtime and expense that comes with a complete migration.

One of the new features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 is enhanced disaster recovery, which allows administrators to bring the server online quicker. This is done by allowing the server to send and receive mail while the message stores are being recovered from backup. Better anti-virus and anti-spam protection have also been added, both by providing built-in APIs that facilitate filtering software and built-in support for the basic methods of sender-IP, reverse DNS ("Sender ID" framework), and RBL filtering which were standard on other open source and *nix-based mail servers. Also new is the ability to drop inbound e-mail before being processed. There are also improved message and mailbox management tools, which allow administrators to execute common chores more quickly. Others, such as Exchange Conferencing Server have been extracted completely in order to form separate products. Microsoft now appears to be positioning a combination of Microsoft Office, Live Meeting and SharePoint as its collaboration software of choice.

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