Creating a Public Folder for Newsgroup Access

A common question in the Microsoft newsgroups is, "Does Outlook read newsgroups?" Outlook doesn't support viewing of newsgroups using network news transfer protocol (NNTP). Outlook's default news client is Outlook Express. Previous versions of Outlook enabled you to open a news-only version of Outlook Express by selecting View, GoTo, News. Outlook 2003 removes this entry from the menu. You can, of course, add it back by customizing your toolbars, as shown in Figure 29.22. Locate the News command in the Customize dialog box and drag it to an existing toolbar in Outlook.

Figure 29.22. You can customize your toolbar to add a button to launch Outlook Express in news-only mode.

There's really only one way to configure newsgroup access through Outlook 2003. Your Exchange administrator can configure Exchange 2000 to receive a feed from a newsgroup server and display those items in a public folder. Your users can then read and respond to items in the public folder and have the responses sent back to the news server.

You can even configure Exchange 2000 to host your own newsgroups, such as a technical support newsgroup for your own employees.

Setting up Exchange Server for newsgroup access is beyond the scope of this book. For more information, consult a book about Exchange Server 2000 or Exchange Server 2003, such as Special Edition Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 or Special Edition Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, both published by Que.