Exchange 2000 offers new features aimed at making it a true collaboration platform.

Exchange 2000 Calls for a New Way of Thinking

Exchange 2000 offers new features aimed at making it a true collaboration platform.

• By Chris Baker
• 06/01/2000

Sure, Microsoft Exchange may be a great platform for email. But which platform offers automated workflow solutions, Web-based collaborative solutions, conferencing solutions, or even application hosting services? The answer is… Exchange 2000, due in final release before the end of June.

One of our key goals in developing Exchange 2000 has been to enrich it to make it a true collaboration platform. Exchange 2000 supports the innovative collaborative solutions that organizations of any size need to gain maximum business advantage from their technology infrastructures.

For MCPs in Solution Provider organizations, this means new opportunities to upgrade your existing customers, as well as to offer cost-effective solutions for sophisticated applications—such as videoconferencing—to new customers. For MCPs in customer organizations, you now have new ways to support collaboration and workflow among your co-workers, making your network—and yourself—increasingly strategic components of your organization.

Exchange 2000 offers various new features and technologies. For example, Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server makes it easy for you to offer dedicated servers for “meetings without walls.” Knowledge workers can participate in, as well as organize and manage data around, voice and video conferences across the intranet and Internet. IT administrators, meanwhile, gain tools to easily administer the backend with support for bandwidth allocation, load balancing, and fail-over.

Exchange 2000’s Web Storage System is an ideal place to host Web-based collaborative applications. You can use it to manage applications, projects, or entire communities of shared interest. The Web Store is tightly integrated with Windows 2000’s Internet Information Server (IIS), making it an ideal location to host intranet applications.

Exchange 2000 also includes unified messaging, letting you combine voice mail, email, paging, faxing, and more into a single user interface. Major third-party providers like Alcatel, Cisco, Lucent, and Nortel are providing products and services using this technology, making it easy for you to integrate it into customer solutions.

The Workflow Designer for Exchange Server, combined with the Exchange routing objects, gives you the tools you need to create automated workflow solutions that streamline and speed processes throughout an organization.

Exchange 2000 makes it easier to communicate anytime, anywhere. Outlook Web Access keeps customers or co-workers in touch with their valuable business and personal information from any Web browser; Exchange 2000 also supports wireless standards, so knowledge workers can access their information from wireless PDAs, such as the RIM Blackberry, or from wireless, Web-enabled cell phones. And it does all this while bringing scalability and reliability to new levels with features such as support for multiple databases and Windows 2000 clustering.

We’ve also made it easier for you to get up to speed with Exchange 2000. Visit the Exchange site at www.microsoft.com/exchange for access to white papers, deployment guides, the MSDN Exchange Developer Center, and the release candidate software itself. We’re also offering new Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) courses to give you the training and certification you need to maximize your understanding of Exchange. For more information on these courses, visit www.microsoft.com/ISAPI/train_cert/catalog/findcrse.asp. If you still thought Exchange is just for messaging, maybe it’s time to exchange your point of view.