The Synod of Alaska-Northwest now offers Microsoft Exchange email hosting, a feature-rich communication tool that provides:
- built-in protection which includes anti-spam, and antivirus,
- confidential messaging,
- unified messaging which lets you receive voice mail, faxes, and voice access,
- email that is available anywhere you have an internet connection,
- the ability to synchronize email, calendars, tasks, etc. with mobile devices.
You will be able to keep your domain name and can rest assured that your ministry is private and secured by Microsoft technology.
For churches with 5 or fewer email users, there is no charge for Exchange. For ministries with more than 5 employees/volunteers, there is a $15 fee per user . This one-time fee helps cover our cost of software licensing.
Those ministries already running small business servers or using third-party hosts to help them with Exchange Server hosting realize what an amazing cost savings this opportunity is. And if your ministry can afford to buy extra licenses to help out the smaller ministries in our synod, donations of extra licenses are greatly appreciated!
MailEnable
The Synod also offers a simpler email solution, called MailEnable, which provides SMTP and POP3 services for Microsoft Windows systems. There is no cost for MailEnable email.
To take advantage of these great resources, please contact the Synod office so that we can validate your Alaska-Northwest ministry:
Phone: 206-448-6403
Email: techministry@synodnw.org
Getting Started
Once your ministry has been validated, you will need to install your certificate before you can use Exchange. Certificates are used for encrypted connections and identification; connections between your computer or other device and the Exchange Server, which makes your data more secure.
Installing the Certificate
The next step is to decide how you are going to read your email. If you have purchased Microsoft Outlook 2007 you can use it for your email, calendar, tasks, etc. However, if you do not wish to purchase Outlook, you can use all of the features of Exchange using Outlook Web Access (OWA). OWA is simply a means to access your email and other Outlook data using the Internet.
Setting Up Web Access
Setting Up Outlook 2007
At this time we can not offer support for Entourage as it uses an alternate technology to connect to exchange servers called WebDAV. Please use OWA to access your exchange informations, or install Windows 7 on your Mac and use Outlook 2007 or above. For this same reason, we cant support previous versions of Microsoft Office 2003 and before. Contact your Synod or Presbytery with help on purchasing a newer version.