IceWarp vs Microsoft Exchange

In the right corner, please give it up for the heavyweight old school giant, Microsoft Exchange! And in the left corner, a round of applause for the lightweight affordable champion, IceWarp! I want to see a clean fight, no punches below the belt. Touch your gloves and back to your corners.

Round 1: The Features

You already know that Microsoft Exchange is a mail server with exactly 5 features: email, contacts, calendars, tasks, and notes. That’s a good but basic defense; modern business communication requires way more. And here’s where IceWarp starts throwing heavy punches.

 

 

Dashboard & TeamChat

So what does IceWarp have over Exchange? The first thing you’ll notice is the dashboard, which gives you a neat overview every morning (or any time you look at it) of everything that requires your attention – new emails, mentions, notifications, messages. Then you realize that there’s a TeamChat. That’s a no-brainer, right? Instant messaging is generally the best way to coordinate your teams across the whole company, so why is there no feature for instant communication in Exchange? Teams are barely an IM client… just carry on reading.

WebDocuments

What’s another omnipresent task that requires more than two eyes? How about those contracts, internal reports, new press releases? Basically, any kind of document or file is usually prepared by more than one person, reviewed by another bunch of people, approved by a different lot, and finally published by, yet again, someone else. Just try drafting a simple 2-page agreement in collaboration with three people in your company via Exchange… Good luck.

The same process is a breeze if you’re using IceWarp because you can work on any document in real time as a team. Just share a file with everyone involved, see and approve the edits they made, and simply be in control of your files and documents.

Conferences

Let’s quickly finish this round with a precise chin jab, I mean Conferences. You can’t have an online meeting using Exchange. You can have an online meeting and record it using IceWarp. It’s as simple as that, and if you want to find out why Conferences are the new black, check out this article.

Microsoft indeed offers solutions for all these situations, but you have to bring out your wallet every single time. And then, at even higher costs, you have to somehow connect all the different apps together, which is kind of a nightmare. Or you don’t have to think about it, save a lot of money, and have everything the business collaboration needs in one interface. Your choice.

Round 2: The Deployment & Maintenance

Microsoft Exchange took a heavy beating in the first round, but it’s still standing. So let’s dance around the ring a bit longer.

Talking about implementation, you’ll find that Exchange runs exclusively on the Microsoft Windows Server operating systems. On the other hand, IceWarp offers you the flexibility to choose between Windows Server and Linux OS. As we already talked about, it’s possible to extend Exchange with other features such as Microsoft Teams. Those are provided as separate systems though, all for an additional fee and with subsequent hardware and software requirements. Maintenance is a similar story. The more stand-alone apps you use, the more challenging the updates are for your IT department and individual users. Why would you ever go down that rabbit hole?

Instead, make your teams happy – the users will appreciate the all-in-one IceWarp experience delivered in their browsers; the IT teams will praise the little things like the AD/LDAP connection for easier user provisioning.

Round 3: The Price

Do you feel the thrill? The crowd is going mad with excitement as our two rivals once again step into the ring for one last round.

In the end, every business decision is about money. To compare the prices, we run down the numbers for a company with 500 employees requesting a 3-year license. Let’s see what the total cost of ownership (TCO) looks like.

 

The crowd goes wild as IceWarp throws one last hit that completely knocks out Microsoft Exchange! Imagine the cheers and daydream of all the ways you can spend that extra 70% of the money you’ve saved on your business communications from now on. More funds for R&D? Additional sales training? Or a Caribbean vacation for the whole team? We leave the decision up to you, but it all starts with saying no to Exchange and embracing IceWarp as the future of communication for your business. Read more at our web with detailed comparisons. 

 

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