One of the things I have learned is to give people reasons to go to SharePoint and this will help with your user adoption strategy. I have written before about ways to achieve this but I thought I would share one solution that we use.

The unread email is a simple web part that you configure to look at either an on premise exchange server or a hosted exchange for example Office 365 or for educational organizations Live@EDU. It simply sits on your SharePoint site and shows how many unread emails a user has in their Exchange inbox and a click on the icon takes them straight to their mailbox. You can see an example below and also a mock-up of our Metro style unread email icon. Simple but effective and also works with SharePoint 2007 as well as 2010.