Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

I have been looking at Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 OWA (Outlook Web Access) today. We use Ms Exchange Server 2003 in our office, havnt gotten round to updating to the latest version, one of the problems being that we would need to update our server to an x64 version of Ms Small Business Server.

So, I found this cool site that Ms built that allows you to create an exchange account on their server that is active for 5 days. This allows you to send as much email as you like as well as have a look at the new Outlook Web Access system. Which by all standards is really great. The 2003 version of OWA sucks as it can only be viewed properly in Internet Explorer, the "Other" browser version is nasty which is just stupid as most (well most normal) people use Firefox. This is still the case in OWA 2007 except that the "Other" browser system still looks really great.

You can sign up for the demo here: https://signmeup.exchange2007demo.com/exchange2007demo/. It is a very simple process, you give them ur name and a few other bits of information and they will send you an email giving you a password, username and a place to login. The interface of the new OWA is quite similar to Gmail, if ur not using Gmail you should signup (www.gmail.com). Its a really simple and clean interface which is surprisingly strange coming from Microsoft as they are not really known for writing nice and simple applications.

I think that Exchange Server is a really great email server, it is a little bit heavy, and of course it is written by Microsoft - but that asside it is still one of the best email servers i have ever come across.

Another nice thing about OWA is that I can rewrite the theme so that I can brand it for a certain company, you can even setup a hosted Exchange server and sell people email accounts and they get a web front-end, just thrown in for fun.