Integrating Exchange Server 2007 and SharePoint Server

We all know that Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 acts as the primary interface to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. You might not realize, though, that other Microsoft Office products are also designed to integrate easily with Exchange Server. The best example is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), the workplace collaboration and content management platform. When you configure MOSS 2007 to work with Exchange 2007, the users in your organization will be able to easily share documents over a corporate intranet.

Quick Introduction to MOSS 2007
MOSS lets you create an internal Web site (an intranet site) for use by your company’s employees. An intranet site can be used to display corporate announcements and provide access to the corporate directory, but you can set up such sites manually without using MOSS. MOSS’s true value is in letting you establish a document library on your intranet site that allows users to check out, modify, and return documents. Using MOSS permissions, you can control which users are able to read or modify a document.

MOSS also lets users create additional Web sites very easily. For example, a group of employees working together on a project can create an intranet site dedicated to that project, then use that site to share project-related documents, post a calendar of project-related milestones, and provide contact information for those involved in the project.

As you can imagine, MOSS is a fairly complex product, but it’s surprisingly intuitive. After all, it was designed so that even end users can create complex sites.

A Few Prerequisites
Before I show you how MOSS interacts with Exchange Server and what this combination can do for your organization, I need to share some assumptions that I make in this article. I assume that you’re running Exchange Server 2007 and that you have at least one client access server deployed. I also assume that your client access server is configured to act as a front end to your Exchange organization and that the client access server role is not installed directly on a mailbox server.

Another prerequisite is that you need to install MOSS on a dedicated server within your perimeter network. The MOSS server must be able to communicate with your mailbox servers, but for performance and security reasons, you shouldn’t install MOSS on a server running Exchange.

And finally, I’m assuming that you have an established Exchange organization, that you’ve just installed MOSS, and that you’re starting from scratch.

Creating a SharePoint Web Site
Now that the prerequisites are taken care of, it’s time to create a SharePoint Web site that interacts with Exchange Server. First you need to open the default SharePoint site by starting Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and entering the URL http:// your_server/pages/default.aspx, where your_server is the NetBIOS name of your SharePoint server. Upon entering this URL, you’ll see the default SharePoint Web site displayed in IE, shown in Figure 1. Although the default site has nothing to do with Exchange Server, you can integrate Share- Point Server and Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) into a SharePoint site. This allows you to take advantage of one-stop shopping. You don’t have use a separate Web site to access your Exchange mailbox; you can do it directly through the SharePoint site.

Let’s add a user’s Inbox and Calendar to the default Share- Point site. Under Site and Content Management, click the Create new pages, sites, and lists link. You’ll see a screen like the one in Figure 2, which lets you work with Web Parts to create a SharePoint Web site. Because the average user doesn’t know how to write ASP.NET or HTML code, MOSS includes dozens of predefined Web Parts, which are blocks of code that accomplish a specific task. You plug Web Parts into predefined templates to create Web pages—the entire process can be completed in a matter of minutes. You can also develop your own Web Parts. For more information on MOSS and Web Parts, see the Learning Path on page 57.

On the Create Page page, enter a title and a description for the page you want to create. From the list box on the right-hand side of the page, select a template for the page layout. Because we’ll be adding Web Parts to the page, I’ve selected the Blank Web Part Page template. Make a note of the URL assigned to the page.

Next, click Create, and you’ll see the screen shown in Figure 3. This template contains several links that you can click to add a Web Part to a part of the screen, such as Header, Footer, Left, Right, or Center.

Click the Add a Web Part link beneath the screen section labeled Top Left, and you’ll see the list of OWA-related Web Parts. Scroll through this list, select the check box next to the My Inbox Web Part, then click Add. Repeat the process to add the My Calendar Web Part to the Center portion of the Web page. (You can add other Web Parts if you wish.) The template screen should now look like Figure 4.

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