Public Folder Questions

[gmail2]

Hi all,

I'm not very well up on Exchange, so I'll try to explain this as best I can. We don't currently use Exchange in our company and have no intentions of either. One of our partners however does use exchange. There is a connection between our network and theirs. They want to setup public folders which would be accessible by us and also by them. From what I've investigated so far, it doesn't seem to matter that we are on separate domains (no ADFS or trusts), we can just specify credentials when configuring Exchange in Outlook on our side. What I want to know however is:

1. Is it possible for them to create an account for our users on their exchange system without giving them a mailbox? We don't want them to have a mailbox, we want them to just have access to the public folders

2. I'm thining that, rather than blurring the demark point and using outlook for their public folders and our internal messaging system, it might be best if our users use OWA to access those public folders instead. From what I understand, OWA now works and looks just like regular Outlook. So I presume it would be possible to use this option for public folder access rather than using the Outlook client ? That is of course, assuming the first criteria can be met !!

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[mofusjtf]

You could just use a generic user account on their domain and access the public folder through

https://mail.domain.com/public

This should take the user directly to the public folder after they enter the logon credentials.

 

[gmail2]

Thanks for the reply mofusjtf. I know that sharing credentials is an option but it's something I'd rather not do. We've actively working to elimiate all shared credentials within the organisation because they provide no trailback/auditing, often have weak and easy to remember/guess passwords which are not changed frequently and if an employee leaves the company, there is no way to "disable" their access, etc etc etc ... I could go on but I better stop before I go off track !

You mention that the employees could access /public on the mail server (presumably using OWA?). I guess this means they can only see the public folder? But is there any mecanism to stop them from just deleting the /public from the URL after they're logged in?

Thanks again for the reply

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[gmail2]

Sorry - regarding the /public question, I guess the generic account would still require that a mailbox be created? But it just means that only one mailbox is created rather than several

Also, just an after thought on the shared credentials thing - I guess we could try using ADFS, so each user would still use their own credentials but these in turn would be mapped to the same account on the partner side. Don't know how well this would work, or if it would work at all though.

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[mofusjtf]

I agree shared credentials is not the most secure way. You could start with it for a trial period to see if this method will work. Then you can proceed to deploy user accounts for each user.

Yes, this is OWA, they would go directly to the Public Folders after they enter their credentials.

No, the user should not need a mailbox to access public folders. You just need to make sure the user has permissions to view the public folders.

 

[dan]

Depending on the sensitivity of the date, I think they could allow anonymous access to the public folder so anyone could access the data without logging in.
Dan