Microsoft Exchange is a software platform designed to host an organization’s user e-mail boxes, contacts, calendars, task lists, notes, public folders, and more. A user’s primary interface to an Exchange server is via the Outlook program; Outlook being part of the Microsoft Office suite of productivity applications.

Exchange Server (in the conventional in-house, or non-cloud sense) installs on top of Microsoft Windows Server after a number of preparatory steps are completed. After Exchange and all other prerequisites are adequately configured, its becomes possible to begin sending and receiving e-mail between your Exchange server and the outside world. Backing up an Exchange server is best left to professionals. This is because once a business becomes dependent on having an Exchange server, it’s employees aren’t going to be very happy should it go down for any reason.

Over the years Microsoft Exchange has evolved well beyond being a simple mailbox repository, and has now become more of a suite of organization and collaboration tools geared towards use by teams. With the advent of 3rd-party Exchange hosting and Office 365 Exchange hosting; we have more options than ever as to where to home these tools for our teams.

The pricing of the hosted options are reasonable, and most of the bugs have been ironed out of these systems to the point where it is no longer making much sense to continue to host Exchange Server in-house. Even so, some organizations still have application, security, or other requirements that compel them to maintain their own in-house Exchange server. Regardless of which direction you choose (third party hosted, Office 365, or in-house Exchange) you can rest assured knowing you have made a great choice for your primary business collaboration platform (Exchange/Outlook). Many hundreds of thousands of businesses the world over have made the same choice; because the applications and feature sets are so compelling.