There are two technologies in my IT Pro life that I am very passionate about, SharePoint and Exchange, so why not incorporate both passions in a single blog post. In this two part series I will be discussing how we can manage email records from our Exchange mailboxes and archive them in SharePoint Document Libraries for compliance or collaboration reasons.  Exchange 2007 introduced a great new feature set in the name of “Messaging Records Management” or commonly referred to as MRM.  Managed Default Folders is a key component of MRM which will assist us in achieving our archiving strategy. ...

Welcome to part 2 of My Site & Managing User Profile Properties.  In Part 1 we introduced User Profile Properties and how these can be automatically populated via Windows Active Directory (AD).   We also went into some detail regarding the Organization Hierarchy Web part.  You can access part 1 here if you missed it.  In today’s post our focus is around creating additional profile properties either by mapping to existing fields in Active Directory such as Company or creating a field which may not necessarily be mapped to Active Directory but is required to be entered by the user manually. ...

A couple of months ago I posted an article introducing My Site and social enterprise networking with SharePoint, and focused the discussion around tracking colleagues via the colleague tracker web part. If you missed that article, you can access it here.  I also promised that I would provide future articles discussing other My Site features so here is a two part series on My Site and Managing user profile properties with today’s discussion around populating Windows Active Directory (AD).  Some of the common question’s asked are what fields should be populated in AD and how does one populate the...

We all know from experience that advising end users to browse  to https://mail.yourdomain.com/OWA if you are running Exchange 2007 or /exchange if you are running Exchange 2003 is usually problematic .  Oh! and did I forget to mention that it’s HTTPS and not http!  We must admit that not all end users are likely going to remember this URL and at times even struggle to distinguish the difference between secure and non secure sites.  Well if you are running ISA 2006 as an edge or secondary application layer firewall then we can easily simplify the URL that we will publish to our end users by...

In the second and last part of this series we will be focusing our efforts in securing our SharePoint Site through setting up a publishing rule in ISA 2006.  If you recall in the first article, we began our setup by extending the default SharePoint site into the Internet Zone, created a certificate request via IIS to be sent to a 3rd Party Certificate Authority and applied the certificate to our newly created extended site.  If you missed it, you can access part 1 here. So let’s begin the second part of our setup!  The first item we need to address is the newly created certificate that has been...

Do you want to provide your information workers access to your SharePoint Site whilst out of the office easily from any internet connection without compromising security?  Do you want to accomplish this without complicated client-site VPN setups.  In this 2 part series I will be providing you with step by step instructions explaining how you can leverage Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) 2006 and the out of the box SharePoint publishing rule to provide secure access for your corporate users using SSL.  YES! That’s right! Whether you like it or not, Microsoft ISA is a...

SharePoint is all about collaboration right?  As much as we enjoy sending emails, there are limitations and shortcomings around collaboration when relying on good old trusty port 25.  Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft Outlook and Exchange are great communications tools but fail miserably when it comes to sharing information and working together in achieving a common goal.  Have you ever tried to organise and plan a meeting by sending emails to attendees with multiple attachments and re-sending those when modifications are made.  As a recipient this can become quite overwhelming and at times...

Did you know you can create policies within SharePoint that will dictate how long a document will reside in a library before it’s automatically disposed of?  Did you know you can enable barcodes on documents for physical asset recording?  Did you know you can achieve all of this without writing a single piece code?  Information Management Policies within SharePoint is a key and usually under utilised SharePoint feature  that will assist any organisation with the lifecycle management of document  libraries, plus a whole lot more.  These policies can be created at the document library level and...

Wouldn’t it be great if you could deliver digital media content including Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) from your SharePoint site without buffering issues and poor viewing experience.  We must admit that SharePoint itself isn’t great in handling and storing digital media in particular large Video files and we can blame SQL for that!  Even though you can host WMV’s in document libraries just like any other file, features such as fast streaming capabilities effectively eliminating buffering time, and reducing the likelihood of playback interruptions due to network...

We have arrived at the final article of this series on Exchange 2010 Beta, with this post focusing on the new features and technology enhancements.  Today is all about the reasons why we are all going to migrate to this latest product offering when released to the public, right? Okay, so let’s begin with everyone’s favourite, Outlook Web Access (OWA) and focus on some of it’s new features.   OWA has come along way since the days I first used it as an end user in Exchange 5.5.  From the outset you will notice that Exchange 2010 OWA adopts the Windows Live theme, see below screenshots, and by...