Remote mail with Exchange 2k

[gwigington]

Good Morning All,
I am a newbie to Exchange and I need a little help. In our office we have several people that need to be able to send e-mail from remote networks. Yep OWA would be an ideal answer, but I have several employees that don't want to use OWA, so I need to find a way to have their Outlook 2002 and 2003 clients connect to the exchange directly. None of these people stay on the same network for very long so this makes quite a challenge. I first tried setting up Exchange to use static ports and then configured my pix to forward those requests to my exchange server. This works great on 90% of the outside networks, but I need to hit 100%.

I would like to setup my exchange server to work with http accounts in Outlook, but can't find any resources that help me do this. I do have our OWA set up to use ssl and do not have a front-end server. (not enough $$ for additional servers). Could someone help me or at least point me in the right direction. I have a gut feeling that if OWA works on the exchange then http should work in Outlook so then my problem is getting Outlook to use the certificate that I have set up for my https connection.

Thanks in advance

 

[jakatz]

Well here is what we do here (see if it helps you) . . .

We have our users connect via a VPN connection. Once they connect, they are able to open an IE Browser window and type in the following address:

<exchange server name>.<domain>.com/exchange

(obviously insert your own exchange server name and domain names as appropriate).

This brings up a domain login box. Once they enter their network login name / password, it essentially brings up the OWA interface allowing them access their email, etc. Once they are done, they log off of the VPN client and all is good and should not be of a concern to those who are otherwise worried about using the OWA over an open internet connection.

 

[gwigington]

Thanks for the reply, but as I mentioned these employees don't want to use OWA at all. They want the ability to use their Outlook on their PC. I have OWA already setup so they can access it from any where through the web, but what I am needing is to be able to create an http account in Outlook that connects back to my exchange server. From what I have read this is basically setting up the RPC static port mapping on the exchange. Is this correct? I have created the http account on a test machine with Outlook. When I hit send/recieve it sits there until it errors out and tells me a connection couldn't be made to my exchange.

 

[Davetoo]

Your safest route is to setup a VPN (via your firewall or a Concentrator). Your users would access the VPN, then work with their Outlook just like they were sitting in the office. It's a much more secure method.

I'm Certifiable, not cert-ified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

 

[MrBurtal]

Have them go thru a VPN and if xp they can use remote desktop if they want to us their own PC or if it is 2000 use VNC ether way they are using their own PC (or the companies). Johnny