If you want to be at the cutting edge of server matters there’s a new beta version of Exchange Server available.
If you want to be at the cutting edge of server matters there’s a new beta version of Exchange Server available. Exchange Server is Microsoft’s mail hosting service that’s commonly used by companies, including small organization that use Microsoft’s Small Business Server.
Exchange Server is gradually changing from an email host into a communication host. Exchange Server 2007 will let people integrate their fax, phone/voicemail and email into a single location (ie Outlook). The term ‘unified messaging’ looms large in the details of ES 2007.
Not only can voicemail messages appear in your Inbox, but you can play them back by calling a phone line connected to the server. Emails can also be read to you over the phone using text to speech technology (we’ve not heard ES 2007 speak so we can’t report on the quality and accents available).
As you’d expect there is tight integration with Outlook 2007 but ES 2007 will still work with earlier versions of Outlook.
There is also much more linkage between ES 2007 and Sharepoint through features like LinkAccess while will let you view a file from a Sharepoint site while using Outlook Web Access. This is part of “WebReady Document Viewing” that converts an Office document into a HTML version so that you can view it remotely without installing additional software. Google has done a similar thing for some time by offering a web cached version of PDF and Word documents indexed in their Internet search engine with a similar feature available for attachments in Gmail.
If you’re interested and have a spare real or virtual machine with Windows Server 2003 running you can try Exchange Server 2007 beta 2 from here