Client Access to Exchange 2000 Stores

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There are more ways than ever for an Exchange 2000 client to access the Exchange store. Clients can access the information store through POP3, NNTP, IMAP4, HTTP, Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), property promotion, standard URLs, and WebDAV.

The information store specifically supports NNTP and SMTP so that users can create and view Internet newsgroup discussions in addition to sending and receiving e-mail. The store also provides an automatic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 3.2 view of a folder of objects by using property promotion on each object to render this view inside the browser. (Property promotion is discussed more fully in the next section, "Indexing.") For instance, if the documents inside the folders requested are Office documents, the document properties are automatically parsed and promoted to the store. Once promoted, users can create views or queries on these documents that use the promoted properties.

As each message or file is created in the store, Exchange creates a unique URL for that object. For example, a document named Memos.doc that has been saved to the Memos folder in the Administration public folder tree can be viewed with the URL http://server_name/administration/memos/memos.doc. A user's Inbox can be accessed via the URL File://./BackOfficeStorage/server_name.domain_ name.com/mbx/user_name/inbox/document_name.