Notice that each Web Part in Figure 4 contains a link that you
must click to configure the Web
Part. This link is the Edit link. It
doesn’t appear until a Web Part
has been added. When you click these links,
the only information you need to provide is
the name of your Exchange server. Enter the
name as the URL to your OWA server in the
top portion of the My Inbox section (which
isn’t visible in Figure 5, because the contents
of My Inbox have been scrolled down). You
can use the various fields on the page shown
in Figure 5 to customize the size and appearance
of the Web Part.
After you’ve configured the Web Parts
and clicked OK, SharePoint displays the
OWA sign-in screen in place of each OWA
Web Part, as Figure 6, page 58, shows. Keep
in mind, however, that you’re viewing the
template, not the page itself. To view the
actual page you’ve created, enter the page’s
URL. For example, I named my sample page
Exchange, so the URL would be HTTP://server_name/pages/Exchange.aspx. When
you connect to the page you’ve created, you’ll
see the OWA logon prompts. After you log on,
you’ll see a page like the one in Figure 7, page
58, where you can see that the unused placeholders
from the template aren’t displayed.
Only the Web Parts that you’ve added and
configured are shown.
The SharePoint Document Library
I mentioned earlier that a primary feature
of SharePoint is its document library, which
acts as a repository for all document files
users create. One interesting thing about
the document library is that it’s accessible
through OWA.
Microsoft introduced this functionality
to solve a common problem: Instead of attaching a document to an email message,
users often provide a link to the document
in the message. In previous versions of
Exchange Server, the link worked fine as long
as the message recipient was logged on to the
domain and was using Outlook to view the
message. If the recipient was working outside
the office, though, and was using OWA to
view the message, the link to the document
didn’t work.
Microsoft has corrected this problem in
Exchange 2007. Now, when a user clicks a link
to a document through OWA, the Exchange
server sends a request on the user’s behalf to
the SharePoint server that has the document.
After the document is retrieved, it’s sent to the
user. Depending on how Exchange has been
configured and on the document type, users
can open the document in a Web browser or through the application that’s associated
with it. Incidentally, this process also works if
the document is located on a traditional file
server.
Begin the process of making the document
library accessible through OWA by
opening the Exchange Management Console
and navigating to Server Configuration, Client
Access. Select the client access server
you want to configure from the details pane,
then right-click OWA (Default Web Site) in
the work pane and select Properties from the
context menu.
On the OWA (Default Web Site) Properties
sheet, click the Remote File Servers tab. Click Configure and enter the domain suffixes you
want to treat as internal (so that the domain
is trusted; SharePoint allows servers within
trusted domains to be accessible). For example,
my public domain name is brienposey
.com, but the domain name used internally
by my production network is production.
com, so I’d enter production.com. Verify that
the Unknown Servers option is set to Block,
which prevents users from accessing unauthorized
servers through OWA. Finally, click
Allow, and enter the Fully Qualified Domain
Name for each SharePoint or file server you
want your users to be able to access through
OWA.
When users log on to OWA,
a prompt asks whether they are
using a private or a public computer.
Exchange 2007 lets you
configure remote file access differently
depending on how the
user responds to that prompt.
Keep in mind, though, that users
are on the honor system (scary
thought, isn’t it?); there’s no way
to verify whether the user is using
a public or private computer.
The OWA (Default Web Site)
Properties sheet includes a Public
Computer File Access tab and
a Private Computer File Access
tab. The options on both tabs are
identical, letting you configure
file access differently depending
on which type of computer the
user claims to be using. On both
tabs, you select a check box to
enable direct file access. You can
enable file access for Windows
file shares, SharePoint, or both.
You can also enable WebReady
Document Viewing, which lets
users view documents in a Web
browser even if the application in
which the document was created
isn’t installed on their computer.
To use WebReady Document
Viewing, Exchange must have
a document converter for the
specific file type. Office 2007 document
converters are included
with Exchange Server 2007 SP1.
Create Custom
Collaboration
Solutions using
Exchange and MOSS
Now that you’ve seen how Exchange 2007
interacts with MOSS, by enabling OWA Web
Parts through SharePoint, and by allowing
access to documents stored in a SharePoint
document library through OWA, you’re ready
to start planning custom collaboration solutions
for your organization.