End User Experience without Outlook or Windows

JonathanWatts

We have been asked what the end user experience will be like if you have users who are not using Outlook or on computers which are not running Windows. In a nutshell it will work, users will see the a stubbed email which contains a link to view the full email via the UAA Service. Users will not however have the transparently that is possible with Outlook.

Here are two possible views from Red Gate's rarely seen Mac Mini;

Entourage - if you do have users running Entourage, they will have to clear their caches to see stubbed emails, if they have already viewed the original before it was stubbed.



Thunderbird




Any further questions just ask.

Regards,

Jonathan

dgrout

One of the benefits of using entourage as far as i am aware is that when correctly setup it uses http/https to connect into the OWA when used remotely... this allows the users to access thier emails without the need for a VPN (in the same way that outlook over RPC does)

How can this be handled in redgate? our users have been enabled in this manner, but when working over a WAn connection the links to the email in the stub do not work as the URL points to an internal resource.

I assume that we could publish the redgate server somehow on the internet? or would be have to recommend that a VPN is used...?

As a workaround we have been telling users to use the OWA directly (which works fine) but on a MAC this experience is limited..

barbej

We have published the redgate server as mailarchive.<domainname> This is protected behind a certificate (Port 443). We use digest authentication for the authentication. As long as your UAA Service URL (Set in the Maintenance section of the admin console) is pointing to the correct location (for us this is https://mailarchive.) and your firewall allows access, then any e-mail product that uses Outlook Anywhere should work. NOTE I use this location both for internal and external use as it is embedded in the e-mail. You may find you need to move your archived mail back into Exchange and the re archive it set with a location that is available both internally and externally.

barbej

I would say the only problem for Entourage users or other users who can see the stub message (ie outlook users without the addin) is that if you forward the message the archived off bit will not be accessable by the recipient. This does not occur if the message is archived but fully visible (due to the Outllok add-in, or OWA addin).

ericsully

Network World posted an article about a free user monitoring tool which would help http://www.real-user-monitoring.com

yl_777

does anyone know when Redgate are releasing an add in for Entourage?

It saves a lot of time typing in the domain credentials everytime they need to view an archived email

Thanks
Yves