Exchange Key Concepts

Real-Time Collaboration

You can use Exchange to provide real-time collaboration services for your users. Exchange provides Instant Messaging capabilities as well as Chat Service.

Instant Messaging

Microsoft Exchange 2000 Instant Messaging Service is a scalable, firewall-aware, secure, standards-oriented instant messaging platform that you can use in a variety of environments, from enterprises to ISPs. Instant Messaging enables users to have live, or real-time, private typed conversations. Users can also access presence information about other users. Presence information indicates the status of a user on the Instant Messaging network. Users can be online, out of the office, busy, and so on.

You can use Instant Messaging to communicate both within an organization and with other Exchange organizations on the Internet. The MSN Messenger client integrates Instant Messaging communities with the large Hotmail community by allowing users to have contacts from the Exchange Instant Messaging Service and contacts from the MSN Messenger Service on the same contact list.

Chat Service

By using Chat Service, users can join live discussion forums, or chat rooms. Chat room discussions cover a broad range of topics and can be ongoing, spontaneous, public, or private. Chat rooms are expressed as channels in Chat Service.

An Exchange server can host several chat communities, each serving a different business organization or public interest. Chat communities are of particular benefit to the ISP that wants to offer a full-featured and secure chat service to its subscribers.

Exchange 2000 Chat Service is based on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) defined in Request for Comment (RFC) 1459, an industry standard client-server protocol that supports real-time conversation between two or more users over a TCP/IP network.