Most enterprises have recognized that customer relationships play a special role for company success. No customer likes to repeat his requests over and over to different employees or to hear the response “my colleague isn't in and, unfortunately, I don't know when he'll be back”. The speed of market changes requires a quick and adaptable enterprise structure that is able to resist the competitive pressures. The increasingly flatter structures (teamwork and project work) place higher demands on communication and coordination of the involved parties. The optimal company organization plays a central role for communication and information flow, both for enterprise-internal processes as well as for the collaboration with customers, suppliers or business partners. It is vital to avoid breaks in communication structures, to close information gaps and to accelerate the flow of information.

Groupware solutions such as Open-Xchange Server can help you better and quicker coordinate spatially distributed employees by allocating tasks or by supplying the compulsory appointment calendar.

The new version of Open-Xchange Server represents an absolutely new groupware concept. The individual functions are not controlled via menus anymore. Instead, the panel shows the most important functions in every module at one glance. All functions that are used less often are accessible via a single click, because the panel is expandable. Thus, you can pull up all functions with just a few clicks - no more awkward searching the menu bars for the functions you need, which would take two clicks in each case. The introduction of the panel means increased ease of use and better overview.

With InfoStore, the central information pool of Open-Xchange Server, information can be retrieved or made accessible to others at any time. Thanks to the version control of InfoStore, no information gets lost and can be accessed at any time. The possibility of linking data and documents also save time and hassle. Public folders, for instance, allow you to make address data available to the whole company or a group of people. All modifications of these data are made immediately available to everybody. This reduces duplication of data and maintenance.

In your company there are certainly other organizational tasks which are perhaps also tied to a schedule, e.g., resource management. How often do you need conference rooms, prepare beamers for meetings or reserve cars? With resource management, you can better organize meetings or control resource utilization.

Open-Xchange Server continues the successful concept of an efficient mail and groupware server, and offers besides additional functionalities in the form of an efficient groupware solution. On the server side you have a secure and powerful platform with Open-Xchange Server and a Linux server.

In order to successfully use Open-Xchange Server, you should keep some settings and system requirements in mind.

Security certainly plays a dominant role in your company. With Open-Xchange Server you have decided on the right solution. The security aspect becomes especially important when you communicate with your colleagues, partners and customers via the Internet. However, security is above all a question of the client side. With PCs on the client side, widespread e-mail clients and groupware clients (rich clients) in particular pose a known security problem.

Also web servers that do not - like Apache - build on a relatively safe Linux platform represent a known weak spot that an attacker can possibly use to gain access to the underlying operating system core. For external access, Open-Xchange Server supports SSL encryption (the standard for banks) that ensures worldwide safe access to company-internal data from any PC.