Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Tip - To make OWA URLs easier for your end users

Ehlo All,

Did you always want to know how to get your OWA to be http://mail.domain.com? Well, now you can. This is called IIS redirection (all Exchange versions supported). There are 2 major methods to achieve. Option 1 (article below) modifies IIS to do it, and Option 2 is a very short html file. I prefer option 2 (this is what I use for my clients).

1) SearchExchange article explaining the IIS redirection technique. They fail to mention when you enable this it asks if you want to change the configuration for all sub-folders. The answer is NO!
http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid43_gci1363286,00.html

2) Simple html code on your Exchange Server. How I deploy for all my clients.
- within the inetpub directory (default is C:\inetpub\wwwroot), open with notepad "iisstart.html" on your OWA server (front-end, Client Access, all-in-one, etc).
- replace the contents with the following code (blog doesn't allow html code, hence the screen shot below or download it):
- save file and you're done. This URL I used obviously requires an SSL cert, but if you don't (you should), you could make the URL http://mail.domain.com/owa or http://mail.domain.com/exchange depending on your Exchange version.

Enjoy,
-Ben

Article - Quick Tip to improve OWA caching on Exchange 2007

Ehlo All,

Quick tip to improve OWA caching on Exchange 2007. Most admins have plenty of CPU on their Exchange Server and not enough bandwidth. So, this enables more compression (gzip baby) and reduces bandwidth usage. A win win for the vast majority of us.

OWA 2007 configuration tricks to boost performance
http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid43_gci1371540,00.html

-Ben

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Blog Post - Quick Look at Exchange 2010 SP1 OWA Differences

Ehlo,

Came across a good blog post comparison of a few improve views of Exchange Server 2010 OWA versus SP1 OWA. I'm not running 2010 yet (on 2007) since the CDP backup application (AppAssure Replay) I use does not support it yet, but should when Outlook 2010 ships (or I can hope).

Enjoy,
-Ben