Despite the significant expense, there are compelling reasons for some businesses to migrate to Exchange 2010, and we shall discuss five of them here.
While the recession may have bottomed out, and the talk of “green shoots” increasing, confidence is still low and money still tight. You couldn’t imagine a worse time for a company to launch a new platform, even if it is Microsoft and even if that platform is the long-awaited Exchange 2010.
Businesses are facing unprecedented pressure to cut costs and save money. Why then are some considering spending time, money and effort on improving a system that already works quite well? Here are five reasons why.
Voicemail
Exchange 2010 has a feature called Voicemail Preview which allows users to view a transcription of the voicemail within Outlook. Voicemail has always been something of a clunky technology. Noise or interference at either end of the conversation can render it useless. Unless a voicemail system is rigorously maintained, it has a tendency to lose, overwrite or not even record messages. It is also too easy to accidentally delete them. The ability to have a transcript of the message allow users to use it much more freely, cut and paste it, forward it on to other parties and have a permanent record of the transaction.
Information Security
We all worry about data loss, either by accident or on purpose. Exchange 2010 comes with an enhanced Information Rights Management feature that can automatically identify predefined keywords in all emails. This allows a much stricter approach to users being able to share internal information and can reduce data leakage significantly. There are plenty of third party applications that can do this, but having it built in to the system is a bonus.
Data Sharing
One the other side of the coin from information security is the ability to share information with partners and other approved organizations. Information such as calendars, tasks, distribution lists and other data with external partners as if they were part of the same organization. This adds a valuable feature for project oriented companies that use a lot of external talent, but needs to co-ordinate them all.
Reliability
The new Database Availability Group feature (DAG) allows database replication across an entire infrastructure both remote and local. This allows for multiple failovers without loss of service. While this adds complications to the migration and maintenance, it is ideal for high availability environments who depend on email.
Storage
Email has always been a storage heavy entity. With Exchange 2010 the storage requirements are much lower, up to 70% in fact. SAN expenditure is significant for many large organizations, and the introduction of this new system should save on storage costs. Direct-attached storage (DAS) technology can also be used in place of SAN to lower costs even more.
So while the thought of migrating to Exchange 2010 is still a daunting prospect there is still a case for doing it. These five benefits make may the difference for an organization and make the whole process worthwhile.