Exchange is about more than email these days -- it's a business-critical application for most organizations.
That means it has to be available, managed, and secured at all times. When there is a problem with Exchange, the entire company knows about it, so do many people who communicate with your company from the outside.
With Microsoft's Exchange 2007 set to be released to manufacturing next month, the application is likely to become a much larger concern for most organizations. So we've put together this tip sheet for optimizing and running Exchange more efficiently.
Buy Exchange expertise
Sports retailer Zumiez uses an appliance from service provider Azaleos to run and manage Exchange. Zumiez technology director Lee Hudson credits Azaleos with improving sluggish performance and helping migrate from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003. Zumiez uses Azaleos' BladeOne, an appliance that sits in the retailer's data center while Azaleos monitors Exchange's performance and replicates it to a remote DR site maintained by the service provider.
"They are our Exchange department," Hudson says. "We had struggled with Exchange because we didn't have a lot of expertise and time to keep it up and running. Exchange was slow, our users wanted to upgrade, and we were nervous about doing it."
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