Changing the GroupWise WebAccess Login Experience

This section talks about what the user sees and experiences before actually seeing the mailbox from the WebAccess client. This section also covers the options for accessing WebAccess by entering additional information on WebAccess' URL line.

To begin with, there are many ways you can design access into a user's mailbox through WebAccess. Here is a list of the more common approaches we've seen:

• You can have the user simply enter a URL into a browser to access the language page for WebAccess. Here, the user selects the language and then is prompted for a GroupWise username and password.

• You can skip the language page altogether and send the user directly to the username and password page.

• You can configure your WebAccess system so that users must enter a generic username and password to get to the username and password screen of WebAccess. This might help deter would-be hackers from trying to guess GroupWise usernames and passwords.

• You can send users to a company welcome page with FAQs and information about WebAccess on it. From here, users would click some sort of link to get to the WebAccess username and password screen.

As you can imagine, there are many ways to determine what users see before they actually get to their mailboxes. The important thing to remember is that the last thing users must see in order to access their mailboxes from WebAccess is the login page. This is where they will enter their GroupWise usernames and passwords. To get to this login page, the user must get to the following type of URL:

http(s)://your web server DNS Name/gw/webacc

After users get here, they enter their user IDs and passwords and are logged into their GroupWise accounts.

The following URL provides some additional information to help determine how to set up access into users' mailboxes through WebAccess:

http://your web server DNS Name/gw/webacc?GWAP.ip=10.1.1.1&GWAP.port=7205&User.lang=en

This URL directs the browser to use a specific agent located at the IP address 10.1.1.1 using port 7205, and to specify English as the language.

The following URL forces the WebAccess Application to use the simple HTML templates to deliver the content to the browser:

http://your web server DNS Name/gw/webacc?User.interface=Simple

This can be helpful for testing purposes. If users were using a very slow link, you might want to add this as a link from a main page. WebAccess is a bit quicker when the simple templates are used compared to the default frames.

You will see that after the /gw/webacc you must begin the operands with a ? (question mark). Then you separate each operand with an & (ampersand). Knowing this, you can string together something like the following:

http://your web server DNS Name/gw/webacc?GWAP.ip=10.1.1.1&GWAP.port=7205&User.lang=en&User.interface=Simple

This URL should be all one line; it is broken up so that it fits on the printed page.

Note

These URL examples are case sensitive. You cannot enter user.lang or user.interface=simple and have the URL work.