[thelist] Exchange 2000 and an email archive

[Ken Schaefer]

: -----Original Message-----
: From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On
: Behalf Of Theodore Serbinski
: Sent: Tuesday, 8 February 2005 12:47 PM
: To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
: Subject: Re: [thelist] Exchange 2000 and an email archive
: 
: On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 10:33:53 +1100, Ken Schaefer <Ken at adopenstatic.com>
: wrote:
: > Lots of possible solutions. If you want to roll your own solution, then
you
: > can talk to Exchange using WebDAV or MAPI or CDO. You will have security
: > issues - usually only a particular user can access their own mailbox. If
this
: > is a discussion list type situation, you would probably want to create a
: > public folder or similar to hold all the messages. That would be
accessible
: > via Outlook Web Access (OWA) so not much you'd need to do at all.
: 
: Yes this is a dicussion type list and there will be a lot of
: attachments going around as well.
: 
: However, not everyone that will be on the list is actually in our
: domain, we have users from other domains we don't host. So how will
: they be able to access these public folders and what not through OWA?
: Or is there a setting to allow this? I'm pretty much clueless in this
: area, as our IT guys for setting up something like this (not a normal
: request we usually get). Thanks!

Again, there are lots of options :-)

You could give them accounts in your domain (but that does present security
issues). You could set up an appropriate trust relationship between the two
domains (AD can trust any MIT Kerberos v5 realm), or you can use something
like ADFS (or some other SSO solution). Alternatively, use an Exchange public
folder like a news server, and allow anonymous access.

That said, I don't think Exchange would be the best way to host a pure
discussion list (ala something like Evolt) where you have an unknown number
of participants from an unknown number of organisations. You are best off
using a 3rd party tool for that. Alternatively you can roll your own.
Depending on how you want to interface with Exchange, you can use CDO, MAPI
or WebDAV to communicate with Exchange. Assuming that your web app is
configured to use valid and authorized credentials it can extract the
necessary information, and display any way you want.

Cheers
Ken