Microsoft Exchange 2003 is a full email hosting application that allows small businesses to handle their own email in house without paying a monthly charge. Small businesses all around the world host their own email server in house saving them money in the long run. Microsoft Exchange is by no means a cheap program to purchase and to purchase the hardware to run it on is not cheap either. But it allows you much more control over your email and calendar that you would get from a monthly service.

Microsoft Exchange 2003 has one main snap in that controls a lot of your functionality and that is called the System Attendant. From the System attendant you can modify and view your Spam filter and mobile devices that are syncing with your exchange server. So lets go over the main points of the System Attendant.

Global Settings – Where you can control your Spam filter and IMF or Intelligent Message Filter. The IMF will check emails against known Spam signatures and will flag messages as possible Spam. You can also set sender and recipient filters to block known domains that send Spam email.

Recipients – Recipients is where you can control your different address books for Microsoft Exchange users. Your global address list from active directory and your offline address book is stored here.

Administrative Groups – This is the really important area of yor exchange server is, this is where you will make most configuration changes and where you will spend most of your time with setup. This will list all of the exchange servers that you have and you can edit different settings here. Connectors is another very important area because it connects your exchange servers together. This is best used when you have a front end and back end server, you want to connect the two servers so that they communicate together.

The three subjects listed above are the main areas where you will be configuring Microsoft Exchange. Check out for more detailed articles on Microsoft Exchange.