In today’s fast-paced business world, it’s never been more important for organisations to be able to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer demand. The ability to process information quickly and efficiently is therefore key.
To assist businesses of all sizes in doing so, Microsoft offers its users a range of cloud solutions that enable collaborative working practices and the storing of data in remote servers rather than local servers. And one of these solutions is Exchange Online: an email platform that can help you streamline your organisation and simplify collaboration with colleagues.
What is Exchange Online?
Exchange Online is a cloud-based email platform offered as part of Microsoft 365 or as a stand-alone service. Its functionality is comparable to on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange server: it can be used to send and receive emails, manage contacts, and organise information through email folders.
Exchange Online is a subscription-based service that can be accessed remotely by authorised users through a web browser. All data is hosted remotely, and is therefore more secure: businesses don’t need to worry about on-site data breaches or hardware failure.
Business benefits of using Exchange Online:
- Access to your Exchange Server mailbox.
- A unified inbox for all mailboxes in the organisation.
- Customisable email branding and colour theming.
- Mailbox access through any device, including smartphones and tablets.
- Constant updates to the look and feel of the organisation’s email experience.
- One-click archiving and retention compliance with regulatory requirements.
- Faster, more reliable email services thanks to built-in redundancy.
Shared mailboxes
A shared mailbox enables multiple users to access the same mail, calendar, contacts, and other data that is stored in a single mailbox. This is particularly useful for companies that have multiple people managing customer support messages, for example.
To create a shared mailbox:
- Go to the Exchange Admin Centre.
- Navigate to the Dashboard page.
- Select Recipients and then Shared.
- Under Shared, click the add button +.
- Enter as many email addresses for the shared mailbox as required.
Exchange Online Archiving
Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) is a new web-based service that allows you to archive email messages, attachments and items in your mailboxes to Microsoft storage. It preserves your mailbox items in the cloud so that they can be retrieved at any time. This is especially useful when you’re working with large amounts of email, attachments or files in Outlook and want a convenient way to save them for later use.
All mailboxes in Exchange Online have an archive mailbox enabled by default. If you require more granular control when it comes to the retention of your email data, you can set up additional archive mailboxes which are located under the Archive tab in your user profile properties. This will allow you to set retention policies on individual items as well as creating specific archives for specific types of items such as meeting request emails and order confirmations.
Exchange Online Protection
Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is a cloud-based filtering service that uses antivirus technology to scan remote and local emails for viruses and spam. It also scans attachments for malicious code. EOP has advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities, which means that it grows more intelligent as new data is fed into it.
Exchange Online Protection also features other spam-related features that help protect against threats to your organisation, such as reputation management and botnet protection.
The main role of EOP is to provide an additional layer of security to your organisation’s Exchange environment by delivering additional controls over user access and rights management. With these controls, you can ensure that only the right people have access to the right information at the right time and prevent unauthorised changes to your data.
Exchange Online Compliance
Compliance is the process by which organisations ensure that they are adhering to legal and regulatory requirements. It involves monitoring activities, reviewing documentation, and taking any necessary steps to ensure that an organisation’s policies and procedures are being followed.
Exchange Online can be used to help your organisation adhere to regulatory compliance through audit reporting. It can be used to create detailed reports that can be used to track and audit who has accessed what information. Many other compliance-related tasks can also be automated with the help of PowerShell.
Data loss prevention (DLP) can also be used to protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers and other sensitive information. It can be integrated with Exchange Online to help prevent sensitive information from being accidentally leaked.
Implement Exchange Online with expert assistance
Exchange is a flexible and scalable enterprise email solution that offers a user-friendly interface and a wide range of business features. It’s also one of the most powerful tools for collaboration and communication in an organisation.
The Microsoft specialists at Steadfast Solutions can implement Exchange Online into your business, train your users, and manage the environment for maximum security and optimal performance.