UCSI | Microsoft Exchange Server | Chicago, IL

Microsoft Exchange is the email messaging and collaboration server designed to help your business communicate more effectively. Along with the rich client functionality provided by Microsoft Office Outlook®, Exchange offers mobile, remote, and desktop email access with state-of-the-art security and privacy; lower cost of ownership through the services provided by Microsoft Windows Server™; high reliability and outstanding performance; email-based collaboration; and easy upgrading, deployment, and administration.

Unique Computing Solutions will setup and configure a new Microsoft Exchange server based on your business needs (mobile phone email access, remote webmail access, desktop Outlook access), or troubleshoot existing Exchange server issues you may be experiencing.

You can share your own personal Contacts folder with any other Exchange user. Also, all employees are automatically placed in a Global Address List on the Exchange server. The Global Address List is available to all users when addressing inter-office mail.

Groups of employees can be added to a Distribution List on the Exchange server. A Distribution List is simply a collection of contacts. For example, if you frequently send emails to all members of the Sales department, you can create a Distribution List called Sales which contains the emails of all Sales department employees. A message sent to this list will go to all recipients who belong to the list. Outlook converts the Distribution List to individual addresses when sending the email, so recipients see their own name and the names of all other recipients in the To box of the message instead of seeing the name of the Distribution List.

You can share your own personal Calendar with any other Exchange user. This allows other employees to view your schedule without having to directly contact you.

Exchange Server features a Meeting Planner that lets you select users for a meeting, checks each user's calendar to determine a free time, and then notifies each user and updates their calendars with the scheduled meeting.

Public Folders are centralized folders that can be accessed by all employees. Public Folders can contain any kind of information including Contacts, Calendars, or Email. Some examples of Public Folders include:

Contact information for your business partners (insurance company contacts, vendor contacts, etc.)
Calendars to schedule the use of shared resources like conference rooms

OWA (Outlook Web Access) is a web browser based version of your Exchange email account, similar to web-based email offered by Yahoo.com and AOL.com. OWA allows you to access your email away from the office - whether at home, in a restaurant, or traveling on a business trip. Contacts, Calendars, and Public Folders are also readily available in OWA. Send and receive messages from anywhere in the world.

OMA (Outlook Mobile Access) is similar to Outlook Web Access in that it provides browser based access to an Exchange mailbox. OMA allows you to access your email away from the office from your SmartPhone.

You can easily make changes to existing Outlook forms, or you can even design new ones. An example would be adding a new field to the default Meeting Request Form. Default Outlook forms include the following:

Appointment form
Contact form
Journal entry form
Meeting request form
Message form
Message form
Task request form

Exchange server provides a simple tool for you to use in Outlook that notifies others when you are out of the office. Just go to the Out of Office Assistant, select "I am currently out of the office", and type the message you want people emailing you to read. Then, whenever someone sends you an email, they get an auto-reply containing your Out of Office message.

Exchange server allows users to have as many email addresses as they want. Sally Smith can have email addresses called sally@email.com, ssmith@email.com, sales@email.com, specialorders@email.com, and so on. All emails get delivered to the same Outlook Inbox.

Outlook lets you manipulate incoming messages by using message rules that place messages into applicable folders you create under your Inbox. For example, all emails coming from the company CEO can automatically go into a folder labeled "High Priority from the Boss," or all messages coming from client Best Company can get placed into a folder labeled Best Company.

When an employee gets a new computer, there is no need to manually move that user's email and contacts from the old PC to the new one. Exchange server allows you to simply set up the new PC with the user's Exchange server mailbox, and all of that user's past and present messages, folders, and contacts will appear on the new PC.