Managing OWA


You can manage OWA in several ways. If you need to manage OWA for individual users, use Active Directory Users and Computers. Use the Exchange Features tab (Figure 19-3) to enable or disable user access to the user’s mailbox via OWA.

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Figure 19-3: Enabling OWA in a user’s account properties.

To manage the OWA server, you use two administrative tools: the Exchange System Manager (ESM) and the Internet Services Manager (ISM).

Exchange System Manager

With the Exchange System Manager snap-in, you can create new virtual servers or virtual directories that will appear in the Internet Services Manager snap-in. Each virtual server requires its own unique IP address and port number combination. You will create more than one virtual server when you have users with different authentication needs in OWA—for example, when only certain users need to read their e-mail using SSL; or when you host e-mail for more than one domain name and you want to ensure that each domain name has its own OWA configurations.

You create more than one virtual server using the HTTP virtual server in the Exchange System Manager. The virtual server itself has only one property to configure, indicating that this object is not the primary one in which we configure OWA settings—particularly security settings. You can find the HTTP virtual server in the Protocols folder in the ESM (Figure 19-4).

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Figure 19-4: The HTTP virtual server in the Exchange System Manager snap-in.

Internet Information Services

You administer many parts of OWA through the Internet Information Services snap-in. After you open the Internet Information Services snap-in and expand your server to see its subordinate objects, you see several virtual roots that Exchange creates when it is installed:

  • Exchange (http://server/exchange) This root points to the Exchange mailboxes.

  • Public (http://server/public) This root points to the public folders.

  • Exadmin (http://server/exadmin) This root is for Web-based Exchange administration.

  • OMA (Outlook Mobile Access) This root works with mobile clients to enable them to access their mailboxes and public folders.

  • Exchange Active Sync This root is used to synchronize information with mobile clients and their devices.

These virtual roots point to the databases via the ExIFS (Exchange Installable File System). In Exchange 2000 Server, the Exchange databases were exposed as another virtual file system to operating system. Hence, the operating system can read and write files to the Exchange databases similarly to the way it does to a FAT (File Allocation Table), FAT32, or NTFS file system. Because Microsoft is moving to hosting files in a SQL database rather than in the Web Storage System, they decided to leave the ExIFS mounted in Exchange 2003 but not expose it as the (default) M:\ drive, as they did in Exchange 2000. All this means is that the virtual roots in Exchange 2003 are still pointing to the Exchange databases, but the databases are not exposed in the interface as another file system.

Each of these virtual roots can be individually managed in IIS. You can set security, content expiration, and other settings for each part of Exchange using the Internet Information Services snap-in. When you manage these virtual roots in IIS, you are managing the HTTP virtual server in Exchange.




Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Administrator's Companion
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Administrators Companion (Pro-Administrators Companion)
ISBN: 0735619794
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 254

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