KDR Creative Software and The Online Workshop and Microsoft Exchange, the Story so Far.

KDR Creative Software have always had on the back burner the perceived need to introduce Microsoft Exchange into the office. There has been an intention to utilise shared calendars to keep a track of who is where and who is doing what.
Naturally this always remained as a nice to have project given that resources were always allocated to FMMS Support, FMMS development and of more recent times SmartAsset development.

Well with the introduction of SmartAsset and the Office Deployment Capability (ODC) the need to have Microsoft Exchange running in our office suddenly became a necessity and a reality.

Hence, began the project to introduce Microsoft Exchange to The Online Workshop.


Microsoft Exchange 2007 can only be run on 64-bit architecture and operating system, it does run in a 32-bit environment but it is not supported by Microsoft in a production environment.
We purchased a new Dell Server and installed Windows Server 2008.
We setup Active Directory and then installed Microsoft Exchange 2007.
We created a number of equipment mailboxes.

We used these equipment mailboxes to test shared calendar functionality in Microsoft Outlook.


Whilst we have utilised Microsoft Exchange to test SmartAsset ODC we are yet to adopt it into our office environment. There are still a number of outstanding issues to address.
Namely:
- Where does our mail sit before being downloaded by the client. ie. should we utilise an external web mail provider or should we have it delivered straight to our Microsoft Exchange Server.
- How do we setup outgoing mail via Exchange.
- Which equipment and resources should we setup as shared calendars.
- etc


With the work that we have performed via SmartAsset ODC we can see that the introduction of Microsoft Exchange into our fold can dramatically improve our office environment efficiency.
- When a sales person needs the data projector for a sales presentation they will simply check the shared calendar for its availability and then book it out as required.
- When a customer rings our office wishing to speak to a particular staff member who is not in the office we can simply check the shared calendar and let them know when they are expected back in the office.
- And many more possibilities.