Exchange Server 2007 as the Focal Point for Remote and Mobile Communications

Starting with Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft has added significant focus on support for remote and mobile access to Exchange. Remote and mobile access takes on two forms for Exchange: One is in the support of remote access users to Exchange with the improvement of the OWA client and mobile laptop user, and mobility is enhanced in the areas of access and synchronization with Windows Mobile and Pocket PC devices.

Remote access to Exchange has become extremely important as users want to access Exchange outside of the business office, potentially from a home computer, an Internet cafe kiosk system, or from a laptop they are carrying with them. OWA 2007 is now nearly feature complete compared to the full 32-bit Outlook 2007 client with full support for filters, spell checking, drag and drop of messages, out of office rules management, calendar and contact access, and the like. Many early adopters to Exchange 2007 have found the new OWA so feature complete that when they are remote, they only use OWA as their method to check and manage their messages.

A new feature of OWA in Exchange 2007 is the remote document access feature. Remote document access is a new function that allows the administrator of a network to share internal network shares through OWA. Normally, for a user to access an internal Universal Naming Convention (UNC) such as \\server\share\, the user needs to be on the local area network (LAN) or they need to have a virtual private network (VPN) connection to securely connect to the network from a remote location. With remote document access, after a user is logged on to OWA, any network shares that the network administrators specifically allow to be accessed using remote document access can be accessed from the remote user, as shown in Figure 1.3. For organizations that have implemented remote document access in Exchange 2007, most have gotten rid of their need for VPNs because between OWA and remote document access, a user can access email, calendar, contacts, and internal file shares. From a security perspective, whatever file-level security has been enabled on the network shares relative to user access are activated as part of the remote access security for the user to the remote document access share privileges.

Additional remote access improvements in Exchange 2007 include just a name change of what used to be called RPC over HTTPS to what is now called Outlook Anywhere. RPC over HTTPS, or Outlook Anywhere, is the ability for a user running Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 to connect to an Exchange server using HTTPS and synchronize with the server using 128-bit encryption without using VPN access. The remote connection between the Outlook client and Exchange is encrypted so that the synchronization is protected. Although a VPN connection is no longer needed, Outlook Anywhere also does not require special ports or configurations to be opened up on firewalls or special settings to be configured. Outlook Anywhere uses the same connection address that the organization uses for OWA. So, if users normally type in https://owa.companyabc.com to get access to OWA, the Outlook Anywhere connection point for the Outlook user is also owa.companyabc.com. Between remote document access and Outlook Anywhere, an organization can seriously evaluate whether it needs to continue providing remote VPN access to the network, or possibly provide VPN access to a limited number of users whose remote access needs go beyond the requirements provided by OWA, remote document access, and Outlook Anywhere.

On mobility, Microsoft has greatly enhanced the capabilities of remote access of users who have Windows Mobile and Pocket PC devices. Exchange 2007 had a significant improvement to ActiveSync that extends the direct push function that was included in Exchange 2003 SP2 that has the Exchange server push or send messages to Windows Mobile devices instead of having the Windows Mobile devices constantly poll the Exchange server for new messages. New to Exchange 2007 mobility is the ability for Windows Mobile systems to remotely search for old messages. In the past, a mobile device only had access to the messages that were synchronized by ActiveSync to the device, which usually meant 2-3 days of historical calendar appointments, and only the Inbox for messages. With Exchange 2007, a Windows Mobile device can now query all folders to which the user has access to find messages and download them to the mobile device at any time. In addition, just as OWA has the remote document access feature that brings down files from network shares without setting up a VPN connection, Exchange 2007 provides remote document access to Windows Mobile users.