Exchange - Remote Access

[mparry]

Hi,

Any information on the following much appreciated.

Our business will shortly be implementing a VPN solution for 25 remote users - to enable them to access TS apps at our head office. We would also like to provide the remote users with access to Email accounts on our central Exchange 2k server. I am trying to define the best way of providing this. I know that Exchange clients can view their Email accounts in a web based format (which I presume uses less bandwidth and has less features) but I was wondering how viable it would be to have them collect their mail by using their usual Outlook clients and setting up pop3 activated accounts. Would users still be able to use Public folders etc...

Basically I'm looking for information on possible ways to allow remote users who access our central office using a VPN (either PSTN dialup or broadband) to the Email and document sharing resources on the internal Exchange server.

Thanks

Marcus

 

[mortkc]

we are currently doing exactly what you are attempting to do. The setup is very easy, in fact once you have established the VPN connection, the setup is the same as a PC on your local network. As long as DNS is set up properly, and they can see the network there is no reason why the setup of Outlook will pose any problems.

 

[mparry]

Thank you for your reply.

What about 'public folders'... will shared resources also be avilable to remote VPN users?

Thanks,
Marcus

 

[mortkc]

yes, once they are connected (authenticated) they will be a network user and have access to everything they have permissions to. If they get errors when mapping a drive, check DNS or try the IP address instead of the host name. The authentication process is the same, it is only the method of accessing the network that has changed, and these settings may need to be tweaked to get the results you are looking for, but it is pretty straight forward.

 

[mparry]

Cool... thanks.

 

[TechSalesWoman]

Mort, how is performance with this solution? Do users experience much (if any) lag?

 

[mortkc]

If they are coming in via dial-up modem there will be latency by nature of the connection, but it is tollerable. With DSL and Cable connections my experience and feedback is that it is almost as good as sitting on the network in our building. We have users that work from home every day and do all of their work while connected to the network. We have seen little loss in productivity, especially with high speed connections. I personally connect over DSL and do system maintenance on our servers, and notice little latency.

 

[rrsub]

You could always create the offline file for the remote users and teach them to "F9".
Tell them to do their Emails, dial-up, "F9", and repeat once if latency is the problem.

 

[mparry]

Yep, what i'll do is test the above solution (dialup + dsl remote clients connecting via VPN) as I think it should be good. If there are issues I may try moving Outlook to fuction on one of the terminal servers - so that remote users actually use the Citrix solution which will be inplace anyway to operate their Email accounts. I'm told no functionality is lost by doing this (unlike Outlook Web Mail).

My biggest problem is that 'DSL' is only available in around 40% of our loactions... and BT aren't rushing to do the rest. My philosophy was to have cheap (pref always on) connections to hq. In the locations that don't have DSL I don't want to fork out conversion + line charges for ISDN either, so I hope flat-rate dialup analogue isn't too bad!!!

Cheers again, see ya.

Marcus