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Traditionally, in order to access an internal share or site link posted within an email, one had to be connected to the company network. In addition, access to internal files was not available directly from a mobile device using ActiveSync unless the mobile device was tethered to the network.

With Remote File Access in Exchange 2007, one can access files as read-only from anywhere using Outlook Web Access (OWA) or ActiveSync.

The basic steps on how to configure Remote File Access are posted on TechNet here.

What follows here is an overview (including a few screenshots) of what to expect as far as configuration goes and some of the caveats to look out for before implementing Remote File Access.

First, let's take a look at ActiveSync!

The Remote File Servers tab is configurable in both OWA and ActiveSync using the Exchange Management Console. Once those settings are stored in Active Directory, the CAS references Active Directory to detect what internal servers are accessible for Remote File Access. For an explanation of each setting available, refer to TechNet here.

Here is a sample command using the Exchange Management Shell to enable Remote File Access for ActiveSync:

Set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory -Identity:"ServerName\Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync (Default Web Site)" -RemoteDocumentsBlockedServers:"ServerName1,ServerName2" -RemoteDocumentsAllowedServers:"ServerName3" - RemoteDocumentsInternalDomainSuffixList:"DomainSuffix" -RemoteDocumentsActionForUnknownServers:"Block"

For Remote File Access in ActiveSync to work correctly, one must also configure the ActiveSync Policy to allow WSS/UNC access.

Moving on to OWA.

There are three tabs to configure Remote File Access in OWA. They are the Remote File Servers tab in addition to Public and Private Computer File Access tabs. The Remote File Servers tab looks and can be configured the same as the Remote File Servers tab for ActiveSync.

The Public and Private Computer File Access tabs allow for more stringent file access based on OWA Public or Private computer connections.

Here is a sample command using the Exchange Management Shell to enable Remote File Access for OWA: (look familiar???)

Set-OWAVirtualDirectory -Identity:"ServerName\OWA (Default Web Site)" -RemoteDocumentsBlockedServers:"ServerName1,ServerName2" -RemoteDocumentsAllowedServers:"ServerName3" - RemoteDocumentsInternalDomainSuffixList:"DomainSuffix" -RemoteDocumentsActionForUnknownServers:"Block"

NOTE: Once Remote File Access for OWA is configured, one can access internal shares via links in e-mail or by using the Documents button.

Be aware the caveats before implementing Remote File Access:

1) Only mobile devices connecting through the new Exchange ActiveSync protocols (introduced in Exchange 2007) can take advantage of the Remote File Access functionality. Windows Mobile 6 and above have this capability.

NOTE: This functionality may vary depending on vendor and model. If unsure, consult the device log. A way to test is by using the Windows Mobile Emulator. Steps to install and configure Mobile Emulators can be found here.

2) Although OWA can access links to sites or files, any link within an ActiveSync email must be to the file (not to parent site where the file exists) in order for the device to be able to open the file. Example - ( A WSS link http://wss/sites/testfile.doc or a UNC link \\server1\testfile.doc )

3) For any link within an ActiveSync email that contains a period in the DNS name such as http://wss.contoso.com/sites/testfile.doc, the URL must be placed within the Exceptions list in the device to recognize the address as an intranet address and not an Internet address.

Take the following actions on the Windows Mobile device

1) Click Start, Settings, Connections...

2) Click the Connections icon

3) Choose Advanced tab, then Exceptions...

4) Add the FQDN or wildcard in the URL list by Clicking the Add new URL.

5) Click Ok and test the link in the email again.

NOTE: The above steps may differ depending on the device model. If unsure, one should consult the device manual.

NOTE: One will know if the device is attempting to connect to the remote file using ActiveSync if "ActiveSync:" is appended in front of the URL on the device's IE browser's Address bar.

Example: ( activesync:http://wss.contoso.com/sites/testfile.doc )

The "activesync:" appended in front is the encapsulated redirect that CAS sends back to the mobile device so the device knows to connect through the CAS in order to get to the internal file. By default, the device will always attempt to connect through ActiveSync first when opening an email link unless the FQDN is not listed in the Exceptions list as shown above.

To test these settings, you can use the Windows Mobile Emulator.

4) Accessing Remote Files does not work from a mailbox logged on via CAS to CAS proxy. If one is using on a Mailbox Server in Site2 and the Internet facing CAS is in Site1, the request must proxy from the CAS in Site1 to the CAS in Site2 in order to access the mailbox. Therefore, the Remote File Access request would fail in this scenario.

If one is a user on a Mailbox Server in Site2 and the Internet facing CAS is in Site2 and the File Server is in Site1, then the remote file access request will be successful in this scenario.

NOTE: One giveaway to detect if a user is logging into a mailbox through a CAS proxy is to check if the Documents button is showing in OWA.

In the scenario where CAS to CAS proxy is used and Remote File Access is a necessity, set the CAS (in the site where the user's mailbox is located) as an internet facing CAS and create another public DNS record to point to it. All future requests at that point will redirect instead of proxy to the second site. This may require a second firewall or proxy server to handle requests from the internet to the new internet facing CAS.

When taking this approach, mobile devices must be changed to look at the DNS Name for the ActiveSync Server, otherwise the ActiveSync request mail fail instead of attempt a redirect.

A good blog post on how CAS to CAS Proxy works can be found here.

- Steve Swift

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Davton SyncManager is an automated tool to copy items from Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to folders in a user’s mailbox. This enables syncing of public folder items with Blackberries, iPhones and other PDAs. SyncManager provides a one way synchronisation to protect the integrity of the central contacts. It has the ability to: sync Contacts, Tasks and Calendar Items; filter items to be copied based on the category of the item; copy from up to three central folders into one local folder per item type – ie 3 x Contacts, 3 x Tasks, 3 x Calendar. Free 15 day trial.

Davton EnterpriseSync is a multi-mailbox automated tool to copy items from Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to folders in user’s mailboxes. This enables syncing of public folder items with Blackberries, iPhones and other PDAs. It runs as a service and requires no installation on the clients computer making it ideal for managing groups of users. EnterpriseSync provides a one way synchronisation to protect the integrity of the central contacts. It has the ability to sync Contacts, Tasks and Calendar Items; filter items to be copied based on the category of the item; copy from up to three central folders into one local folder per item type. Free 15 day trial and remote installation support.

The Outlook team is very pleased to announce the official release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, the culmination of months of hard work to bring our users performance and reliability improvements which have been tested and shown to significantly improve the speed and responsiveness of Outlook! This Service Pack is the result of a large and directed effort to make your Outlook 2007 experience great and we think that you will be pleasantly surprised.

The Outlook team targeted your most common daily workflows and made them faster and more dependable. Significant improvements were also made in the areas of launching, synchronizing and reliably searching with Outlook 2007. Users with small to average size mailboxes will see a 26% performance increase and users with large mailboxes will see a 35% performance increase in the following areas:

• Faster startup and more reliable shutdown
• Faster folder switching between folders with a large number of messages
• Better overall responsiveness when performing common tasks

For more detailed information on Service Pack 2 performance benchmarking read the following report from Principled Technologies, an independent 3^rd party performance analysis company. The report includes detailed test results on different hardware types and with both small and large mailboxes, so it will give you an idea of how much faster Outlook will perform based on your environment.

We previously blogged about the February Cumulative Update which was a large collection of fixes designed to quickly address problems that were preventing Outlook 2007 deployments. Service Pack 2 is a collection of those fixes and more that has been thoroughly tested and all Office 2007 users should feel confident installing it on their machines. To experience these improvements install the service pack today and let us know how much faster and better Outlook is for you!

For more information about Outlook SP2 improvements see the whitepaper here.

You can use Microsoft Update to install Office 2007 Service Pack 2 by clicking here and then choosing “Check for updates” in the left-hand column.

Note: Upon successful installation of the update, the first time Outlook is run there will be a one-time delay as Outlook optimizes your data files as shown by a progress dialog (pictured below). After this initial process, performance will be improved. If you have already installed the February Cumulative Update Outlook will not need to repeat this optimization, so you will not see this one-time delay on startup.

The Outlook Team

Have you ever sent a really well thought out, important email, only to find out (through an automatic response) that the recipient is on vacation for two weeks? For most of us, this means either waiting two weeks for a response or emailing an alternate contact. For the recipient, it means dealing with tons of messages when returning from vacation.

This scenario is one of the many reasons we developed MailTips in Exchange Server 2010. MailTips are there to give you information about your message and its recipients before you hit the send button.

For instance, this MailTip will show you automatic replies for recipients of your message:

When you know that someone is on vacation before you send them a message, you won't waste your time writing it, and they won't have to read as many messages when they get back.

Have you ever read an email from someone and thought to yourself, "Do they realize how many people just got that message?" All too often, the answer is "no." MailTips will tell you when you're sending a message to a large audience, and summarize it for you, like this:

Hopefully this person will probably think twice before emailing all 438 people!

Another common email faux pas is when someone replies-all on a message they received via BCC. When they do, they reveal to other recipients that they received the message via BCC-often with embarrassing results. MailTips will warn you when you reply-all on BCC:

External recipients: MailTips will let you know if you are sending a message to an external recipient (that is, somebody whose email address is outside your organization), or if a distribution group you're sending to contains external recipients (in the case of external recipients in a DL, MailTips only says how many external recipients there are, not who they are). Organizations can turn this MailTip off, if emailing external recipients is not a concern.

Mailbox full: You can know before you send if the recipient's mailbox is full, or if the message you're about to send is big enough to fill the mailbox.

Oversized message: This MailTip is displayed when composing a message that exceeds size limits within your organization.

Moderated group: MailTips will tell you that you are sending an email to a moderated group (which is a new feature in Exchange 2010... keep an eye out for a blog post on that). In this case, your message would be delayed pending moderator approval.

Restricted recipient: If you don't have permission to send to a mailbox or distribution list, MailTips will tell you right up front.

Invalid recipient: If someone leaves your organization, they might remain in the autocomplete list of Outlook users. In the past, sending a mail to this user would result in a bounced message (which would then remove them from the autocomplete list). With MailTips, we can notify you before send that a user doesn't exist anymore.

Custom MailTip: Administrators and group owners can set custom MailTips. These are intended to replace messages that might otherwise be sent as an automatic response. Examples of these are messages like "You will receive a response within 72 hours" or "this mailbox is not monitored." They might also be useful for a user who works part time, and might not want to always have an automatic reply set up. Custom MailTips can be localized so that users can see them in their own language.

FAQ

Q: What clients does MailTips support?
A: Though the screenshots posted above are from Outlook Web Access, MailTips are also a feature of Outlook 2010. Legacy Outlook/OWA versions are not supported.

Q: How do you count the members in a group? Do you count nesting?
A: There is a service we call Group Metrics which runs on a Mailbox Server (by default it's the server that generates the OAB) that counts members of groups nightly. This data is distributed through Exchange File Distribution to CAS servers, so that they have the data on-disk. Group sizes are accurate for a single group, including nesting, but MailTips cannot detect if you address two groups that have members in common.

Q: Can I configure MailTips?
A: Administrators have the choice of turning MailTips on or off for the whole organization. You can also turn the external recipient MailTip on or off. In OWA, when you close the MailTips bar (by clicking on its anchor icon), it stays closed and out of your way. Outlook has configuration client-side, but I'll leave that to the Outlook team to talk about.

Q: How up-to-date are MailTips?
A: Data about group sizes is updated nightly and distributed to CAS machines thereafter. Other data is cached client-side only (Outlook/OWA). The standard client-side cache expiry is 24 hours. For the mailbox full and automatic reply MailTips (which we expect could change more often), the cache is 2 hours. Clearing this client-side cache is just a matter of restarting OWA or Outlook.

Q: What about performance?
A: In our preliminary testing, we have seen no more than 5% increase of load on CAS servers that have MailTips enabled vs. disabled.

We hope that when you start using Exchange 2010 in your organization, MailTips will help you to be more informed, less stressed, and more confident about the emails you send.

Happy emailing!

- E.J. Dyksen

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An organized mailbox is critical to getting work done, especially if most of your day involves working with Outlook. However, spending more time organizing your mailbox means there’s less time to spend on real work – thus it’s important to find a system that is both simple and efficient.

In this post I will talk about one way you can triage mail using categories and Search Folders. Keep in mind that no single e-mail management method is ideal for all work styles; this is just one method of many and if you’re looking for a change you might want to give this a try and see if it works for you. If you haven’t already, I suggest you install the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007, as it has performance updates for Search Folders.

This triaging technique is aimed at quickly working through a long list of e-mail and deciding which e-mails need your attention now, and which ones can wait until later. By the end of this post you’ll know how to triage each new e-mail with a couple quick clicks and you will have easy access to the messages that need your attention throughout the day.

Setting Up your Mailbox

In order for this to work you will need a set of categories that represent what actions you need to take with any given e-mail. In this post I will assume you already have the following categories created (To create categories, go to Edit | Categorize | All Categories, then click New):

• Response Needed – Use this for e-mails that you need to follow up on. If something is extra important it should probably get a response right away – everything else can get this category.
• Read Later – Use this for e-mails that don’t need a response, but should get read eventually.
• Reference – This category will be for e-mails that contain information that will be useful to access easily later.
• Personal – And finally, a category for non-work-related e-mails just to keep them separate from the rest.

You may recognize this set of categories is similar to other mailbox management techniques, like Getting Things Done.

Now let’s set up the search folders you will be using to help manage your mailbox. You will need one search folder for each of the categories above. Here’s how to make them:

Right-click Search Folders in the Navigation pane and select New Search Folder. You will see a dialog like the one on the right.
Scroll down and select Categorized Mail from the Organizing Mail group. Click the Choose… button and select one of the categories above. Click OK.
You need to restrict this search folder to only searching your Inbox (and sub folders) – otherwise it will include messages from your Sent Items and Deleted Items folders. To do this, right-click the Search Folder in the Navigation Pane and choose Customize this Search Folder. Then click the Browse button, uncheck the top box titled “Mailbox”, and check the box next to “Inbox”, like in the picture on the right. Click OK to close the dialogs, and you’re done!

You’ve just created a Search Folder for the first category! Repeat this for each additional category above.

The last search folder we need to create is going to replace your Inbox as the place you look for new mail because you’ll only want to see mail that has not yet been categorized. Creating this search folder is a little more complicated:

Right-click Search Folders in the Navigation pane and select New Search Folder.
Scroll down and select Create a custom Search Folder (it’s at the very bottom of the list). Click Choose... and you’ll see a dialog like the one on the right. Specify a name for this new Inbox like “New Mail” and then click Criteria....
In the Criteria window that pops up click the Advanced tab. From the Fields selection box choose Frequently-used Fields | Categories. Finally, set the Condition to ‘is empty’ and click Add to list. Close the window by clicking OK. You’ve just created a search folder that will show all mail that does not have a category – this will be your new Inbox! Note: it may take a while to build the search folder if your mailbox is large – initially it will contain every mail in your mailbox.
Like before, you need to restrict this search folder to only searching your Inbox (and sub folders). Right-click the Search Folder in the Navigation Pane and choose Customize this Search Folder. Then click the Browse button, uncheck the top box titled “Mailbox”, and check the box next to “Inbox”, like in the picture on the right.

Now there are a few final touches to make this system useable.

• First, add all of these new Search Folders to your Favorite Folders by right-clicking on each search folder and choosing Add to Favorite Folders. Now they’ll be at the top of your Navigation pane and easy to access.
• Next, remove your Inbox from the Favorite Folders area by right clicking it and choosing Remove from Favorite Folders – you won’t need to access this folder directly anymore.
• Finally, you probably have a ton of e-mail in your New Mail Search Folder. There are a couple ways you can get rid of them:

• If your e-mail was already sorted into folders that have purposes like the categories you created above, select all the mail in those folders and apply a category
• If not, you can safely transition to this new system by creating an ‘Old’ category and marking all of your existing mail with this category. This way you’ll be able to start with a fresh ‘New Mail’ folder without worrying about losing that old e-mail – you could even create a search folder for it!
• Of course, if it’s a small amount of e-mail you could categorize it with your new categories.

Alright, we’ve finished with the setup work – now let’s start using this new system!

Quickly Triaging Mail

Whenever a new e-mail arrives it will show up in the New Mail search folder, so you should treat this as a replacement to your Inbox. To triage your e-mail right-click the empty category symbol and apply a category (e.g. Read Later) – that e-mail will immediately leave the New Mail Search Folder and appear in the respective Search folder – quick and easy!

An empty New Mail folder means there’s no new e-mail for you to triage – you’re caught up and can spend time responding to messages (which are already neatly listed in a search folder) or doing other work.

There are a couple ways to work with the ‘Response Needed’ and ‘Read Later’-style folders to track which ones you’ve already seen. You can:

• Use the read/unread status of the mail
• Click the flag icon twice (to make it into a checkmark)
• Delete the e-mail (after you’ve responded to an e-mail, you have a copy in your Sent Items)
• Change its category to something like ‘Done’ (it will disappear from the current folder)

All of these options will work and you should pick the one that best suits your work style.

In this e-mail management system you should aim to keep the New Mail folder empty by applying categories to each message within it – otherwise the system will break down and won’t be useful to you.

That’s It!

I hope you’ll find that this e-mail management system saves you time by making it quick and easy to sort and access your mail in a way that helps you get the most important work done first. Seeing the message counts next to each kind of Search Folder can even help you know how much work you have left.

If you are interested we’ll share additional e-mail management strategies in the coming weeks. Let us know in your comments what you think of this system, how you’ve changed it to best fit your work style, and if you want to hear more!

Tom O’Neill

Outlook Program Manager

CCS Help Desk leverages the power of Exchange Server, Outlook, and the Web to bring you a simple, efficient and effective help desk, customer support and ticket tracking system. It is ideal for companies and organizations that are overwhelmed by user or customer requests and issues. Support requests are entered through Outlook, the Web or email, and then are assigned and tracked. The resolved tickets are kept in an Exchange public folder and can be reviewed if a similar issue arises again. Available in Pro, Standard, and Lite versions. Version 4.2

My review of the Sent Items Organizer, an add-in from Sperry Software that automates the filing of Sent Items.

Add in Outlook power and features with add-ins. Get my take on these cool little programs that customize Outlook to work the way you want it to.

Please go to our Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator updates tracking page to see what is in this new version!

A blog post explaining the calculator (updated for this new version) is here. The download is here.

Comments welcome!

- Ross Smith IV

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