Enterprise e-mail systems are regarded as mission critical applications by organizations of all sizes, as e-mail is the primary collaboration vehicle for workers, their customers, partners and suppliers. The majority of organizations turn to Microsoft Exchange Server to deliver enterprise-wide messaging services that increasingly include messaging components other than e-mail, such as fax and voicemail.

Exchange Unified Messaging brings these different systems together, effectively consolidating infrastructure while improving productivity for users, but at the cost of increasing the load on the Exchange environment in terms of management, storage and importance to the business.