Artisan Mailbox Management and Microsoft OWA

ArtiSan supports the use of Outlook Web Access (OWA) (and Outlook "RPC over HTTP") to allow end-users to access their mailbox content, particularly from outside the corporate boundary. It is common in the modern enterprise that user's, such as "road warriors", perform their tasks outside the corporate boundaries and need access to their email from their home or whilst on business trips.

When an OWA user accesses their mailbox, they will see a similar view for stubs as the Outlook user, with the usual links to access the original content. The key to making the process seamless for the OWA user is to ensure that the embedded DNS location in the stub link is registered in public DNS. In practice, the customer would register the external DNS name (or zone) for the mailbox manager links and make that link route to the corporate DMZ. They would then use standard proxying software such ISA Server to forward the request to the ArtiSan server. When the user clicks on the link in OWA, the request will be routed by the corporate DMZ through to the ArtiSan server where the response is set. Typically, the proxy-firewall will force all the interaction on the public internet to be encrypted through an SSL channel maintaining security.

Within the corporate boundary the same DNS address would be registered locally to avoid internal user requests being routed via the DMZ.

In the event that the customer is not already running a firewall-proxy solution such as ISA Server, ArtiSan is provided with an external component called the Remote Access Proxy. This software is installed at the corporate DMZ and can be configured to allow end-users access to the underlying archive mail content through stubs in the normal manner.