Integrate SharePoint into Your Exchange Environment

As former members of a small IT shop in a large organization, we served as both Exchange and SharePoint administrators. When replacing our old Active Server Pages (ASP)-based corporate intranet, we decided to bring Microsoft SharePoint technologies into our existing Windows environment and create a corporate intranet that improved collaboration and communications among end users by integrating SharePoint and Exchange. You can configure Exchange and Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (referred to here, respectively, as SharePoint Services and Portal Server) to enable similar collaboration capabilities in your environment by using Web Parts and features that let Exchange users access SharePoint document libraries and view Exchange public-folder content in SharePoint. We'll focus on integrating Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, Share-Point Portal Server 2003, and the version of SharePoint Services that's included in Windows Server 2003, although if you're using earlier versions of any of these products, you can still integrate them to a lesser degree. (For more information about integrating SharePoint data into Outlook 2003, see the Web-exclusive sidebar, "Bringing SharePoint to Outlook" at http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 93700.)

Page Viewer Web Parts
Web Parts, the programmable and configurable portions of SharePoint portal sites, are an important means for enabling Exchange-SharePoint integration. One Web Part that you'll find useful in giving your Exchange users access to SharePoint is the Page Viewer Web Part, which is part of SharePoint Services. The Page Viewer Web Part, which functions like an IFRAME element in a Web application and works with all versions of Exchange and Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA), enables the display of any Web page-content from within a Web part. You can set the Page Viewer Web Part to display an OWA page via a SharePoint site.

You can use the Page Viewer Web Part to let users view public folders from within SharePoint and without having to open Outlook, as Figure 1 shows. To do so, you set the URL of the Page Viewer Web Part to the URL of the target public folder. If you want users to see only the contents of the particular folder and not the left folder pane (i.e., the entire list of public folders), as Figure 2 shows, simply append the cmd=contents parameter to the end of the public folder's URL.

To prevent OWA from displaying a logon prompt within a Page Viewer Web Part, be sure to enable Windows Authentication on your Exchange server. (Of course, this works only if the user's computer is part of the same domain as the SharePoint server or if the SharePoint server is in a trusted domain.) If you're attempting to connect to the Exchange server through a SharePoint portal from an external location, you'll want to set up a single sign-on (SSO) solution, which uses a Kerberos authentication token. There are many such Web-access-management solutions, such as RSA Security's RSA Access Manager. (You can find out more about RSA Access Manager in the RSA white paper RSA Access Manager: Secure Web Access Management Solutions for Microsoft Windows Environment, which you can download at http://www.rsasecurity.com/ node.asp?id=1186.)

Be aware that in a production environment, you'll want to install Share-Point on a different machine than the one Exchange and OWA are on. As you're probably aware, Microsoft IIS must be installed to host the OWA client sessions. If you're using OWA, you need to be careful when installing SharePoint into your current Exchange environment. In SharePoint, the Internet Server API (ISAPI) filter in SharePoint handles all incoming URLs (i.e., directs a URL to the requested folder path) and also lets you exclude certain paths from browsing. The ISAPI filter's actions effectively prevent a non-SharePoint Web application from running on the same server without some additional setup and configuration. Although you can exclude Exchange 2003 directories and folders from browsing in Share-Point, it's better to run Exchange and SharePoint on different hardware.

Exchange Web Parts in Portal Server
Portal Server ships with Web Parts that provide discretely configurable bits of functionality, such as event lists and drop-down menus, and includes four Exchange-specific Web Parts that enable SharePoint-Exchange integration: My Inbox, My Calendar, My Tasks, and My Mail Folder (their respective definition files are owainbox.dwp, owacalendar.dwp, owatasks.dwp, and owa.dwp). These Web Parts don't work with SharePoint Services and are supported only in Exchange 2003 and later. By placing one of these Web Parts on an individual's My Site in Portal Server, you can grant the user a Web view of his or her Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, and other Exchange mail folders. (Note that users of Internet Explorer—IE—5.0 or later will see a different view of Exchange Web Parts than users of other browsers, so you'll need to keep in mind which browser(s) your users are using when you plan your SharePoint site's layout.) Figure 3 shows the Web Part list that's displayed in the Web Part Tool Pane in SharePoint, and Figure 4, shows what the user sees via the My Mail Folder Web Part.

When you configure Exchange Web Parts on your SharePoint site, you need to set up each Web Part with the Exchange server's Web address (this is the same URL a user would type into a browser to access OWA) and the individual user's Exchange username. The My Mail Folder Web Part also requires the actual Exchange folder name in a folder/subfolder format. If the specified folder happens to be a calendar or task list, the items in the My Mail Folder Web Part are displayed as they would in the My Calendar or My Tasks Web Parts. This behavior occurs because all the personalized Exchange Web Parts are basically Page Viewer Web Parts with some specific formatting applied. Finally, when you add the Exchange Web Parts to a SharePoint site, be sure to add your Exchange server's OWA URL to the trusted Local Intranet sites on the client machines. Doing so helps prevent multiple logon prompts.

Setting up Exchange Web Parts can be tricky, depending on your IT staff's SharePoint skill level. One source of help is Kristof De Causemaeker's solution for developing your own Web part with Microsoft Visual Studio to set up your portal's MyInbox Web Parts automatically. You can find this solution on his blog, The SharePoint Factory, at http://spsfactory.blogspot.com/2005/12/how-to-configure-your-myinbox-webpart.html.

If the Exchange Web Parts don't meet your needs, or if you're working with SharePoint Services, you could develop your own Web Part or use a third-party SharePoint Web Part such as the My Workplace for Outlook Web Part from CorasWorks (http://www.corasworks.net/products/web parts/outlookintegration.asp) and the WSS Mail Web Part from Blue Dog Limited (http://www.bluedoglimited.com/downloads/default.aspx). My Workplace for Outlook lets you view Outlook data in SharePoint sites, display a single-page summary of Outlook data in an "Outlook Today" format, and download SharePoint contact, task, and event information directly into Outlook, whereas WSS Mail functions essentially the same as Portal Server's My Inbox Web Part.