Site Mailbox in Exchange 2013 & Outlook 2013:

Site Mailbox in Exchange 2013 & Outlook 2013:

Wednesday, 03 October 2012

Author,

Arun Chaudhary

MCP, MCTS, MCITP

(Exchange 2010)

Exchange Administrator, Book writer,

 Freelancer trainer of Exchange Server

Mail me: arunkalagarh@gmail.com

Visit me: http://exchangeby-arun.blogspot.com

About me: I am working as an Exchange Administrator & also a freelancer trainer of Exchange & other Microsoft Servers; I have 6+ years experience in Microsoft servers. I have written many articles on different – different topics & given Exchange Server training for more than 250 Indian & Inter national clients.

Microsoft include many exiting features in the Exchange 2013, in my previous articles on my blog regarding the Exchange 2013, I discuss about the new features of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 {go the http://exchangeby-arun.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/first-look-of-exchange-2013-preview.htmll}.

In this article, I am going to introduce you one more exiting feature of Exchange Server 2013 & Outlook 2013 called Site Mailbox. Site Mailbox is the brand new feature of Exchange Server 2013 & provides you ability to access your emails & SharePoint documents together on a central point.

A Site Mailbox is like a central filing cabinet; provide you a single place to access your emails & projects regarding documents that can be accessed & edit by your site members. When any project member used Site Mailbox to access his / her emails & documents, that time any other site member can also access the documents & can modification.

In Site Mailbox users documents or contents kept where it belongs. Exchange Server stores the email, which provide by users with the same message view for email conversations that they use in their every day for their own mailboxes. Exchange Server is responsible to synchronize with the Share point server to create the documents view in outlook.

An Administrator can apply compliance policies on the site mailboxes.

I wana discussed some questions, which come in mind before I go to configure the Site Mailbox.

ü      How to Filing emails and documents from Outlook 2013: It’s very simple in Outlook 2013, just drag & drops the emails, documents & attachments in Site Mailbox.

ü      Management and compliance: Usually in the organizations, users have only limited rights on the Share point sites, but in the new SharePoint also makes it easier for the end users to create their own SharePoint sites, to integrate shared emails into a new site, users just have to use only the Site Mailbox app with their site.

Site mailboxes can become part of eDiscovery search scopes and the emails & documents of Site Mailboxes can be put on legal hold. Administrator can set a lifecycle policy on the SharePoint sites to define the retention period on the Site Mailbox.

ü      Present Emails & documents together: Users always wants their emails & documents together in context- from the Outlook or SharePoint sites. This solution is provided by the Site Mailbox.

ü      Difference between the Site Mailboxes, Shared Mailbox & Public Folder:

·        In the Site Mailbox users work on shared projects & keep their emails & documents.

·        In the shared mailbox a group of people work on the behalf of a virtual entity, they are triaging incoming emails against a shared mailbox and respond on the behalf of the virtual entity (ex: helpdesk@exchangeby-arun.lab).

·        In the Public Folders documents can’t be store, until they don’t support co-authoring or version management like SharePoint.

Some more exiting features of Site Mailbox:

Ø      You can add Site Mailbox as a recipient in the important discussion, so it will be kept a copy of the important discussion.

Ø      You can forward any document from the site mailbox.

Ø      You can drag & drop multiple documents from site mailbox to your inbox.

Ø      Now you can also add your Site Mailbox or documents folder in your favourites with the same name, just on a right click & select ‘Show in Favourites’.

Ø      If you are a user who can’t remember too much SharePoint sites URLs, then ………. Yes in Site Mailbox, just right click any document & click on ‘Open in Web Browser’.

Ø      After finishing your projects, you can easily remove Site Mailbox from your Outlook, just right click on Site Mailbox & click on ‘Close “Exchangeby-Arun Lab (Project Name)”.

Ø      If you want to manage you’re all the projects regarding Site Mailbox (in the case when a user is working in multiple projects), just right click on your personal mailbox & click on “Manage All Sites Mailboxes….”

Arun Special Notes: Site mailbox is only available in Outlook 2013, not in OWA.

                                                                                Thanks,

                                                                      Arun Chaudhary

Exchange Server Administration Centre

Exchange Server Administration Centre

Author,

Arun Chaudhary

MCP, MCTS, MCITP

(Exchange 2010)

Exchange Administrator, Book writer,

 Freelancer trainer of Exchange Server

Mail me: arunkalagarh@gmail.com

Visit me: http://exchangeby-arun.blogspot.com

About me: I am working as an Exchange Administrator & also a freelancer trainer of Exchange & other Microsoft Servers; I have 6+ years experience in Microsoft servers. I have written many articles on different – different topics & given Exchange Server training for more than 250 Indian & Inter national clients.

Microsoft Exchange Server is very popular email server now days in the IT companies. Microsoft always try to make some good changes in their products to make them more user friendly & easier to management.

Exchange 2010 also has 3 different ways to manage it.

In the coexistence with the Exchange 2013 Server you will get a brand new feature for managing the Exchange Server, called Exchange Administration Centre (EAC).

Ø      Exchange Management Console {EMC} ( graphical view)

Ø      Exchange Control Panel {ECP} (graphical view)

Ø      Exchange Management Shell {EMS} ( very strong cmdlets & scriptable tool)

These three tolls provide very good management capability to manage the Exchange Server 2010.

But as I discuss in starting of this article, that Microsoft always make some changes in their products to make them more user friendly, so this time I am going to introduce you the brand new feature of Exchange Server that called Exchange Administration Centre.

Exchange Administration Centre (EAC) is completely a web-based interface, which make Exchange Server management easier & user friendly. EAC is look like Windows 8 style.

A short introduction to EAC features.

Quick launch:  EAC launch very quickly & don’t hang your system like EMC loading. It’s very fast & rely on local PowerShell.

More easy Hybrid Management: Using the EAC, you can switch between your on-premises Exchange & Office 365 cloud scenario with in a single click, It support Single Sign On (SSO) to manage your complex & hybrid environment.

Instant Notifications: EAC offers you online (visual) & also offline (email) notification for any feature that is integrated with EAC, no need to refresh user interface to get the latest updates. EAC will notify the updates periodically.

Currently Microsoft integrated these features.

Ø      Import & Export of PST

Ø      Certification expiration

Ø      Mailbox migration.

Me tile and Help option: The Me tile option indicates who’s online the current time. The Me tile also provide a entry point for the help desk administrator to login on the behalf of any user to troubleshoot their problems.

The Help links is the primary Help entry point, which is available in EAC & it is context-sensitive.

New Features Panes: EAC have a excellent way to manage its features.

These are the few feature panes in EAC.

• Recipients Management: This option is look like the Recipient Management option in EMC & also provide you management feature for users, group, room & linked mailbox. It also have a migration entry point & dashboard to monitor all ongoing mailbox migrations in one place.
• Permissions: It include RBAC feature to control your Exchange organization roles & also include a new feature called OWA policy.

• Compliance Management: It include many compliance & eDiscovery features, like: In place discovery, hold period, auditing, Data Loss Prevention, journaling, retention policy & Tags.

• Organization: It covers federation, sharing, apps & address list for your Exchange organization.

• Protection: Provide Anti-Spam & Anti-Malware protection.

• Mail Flow: This feature is used to create the Transport rules, configure delivery reports, accepted domain entry. Email address policy & send & receive connectors.

• Mobile: This feature is used to manage & control your Active Sync mobile device.

• Public Folder management: This feature is used to create & manage the Public Folders & their mailboxes.

• Unified Messaging: Using this feature, an administrator can manage voice mail functionality & policies.

• Servers Management: Using this feature, administrator can manage all the servers configurations, like CAS, MBX & HT. using this you can configure HA (DAG), virtual directories & certificates.

• Hybrid Management: This feature allows you to manage the hybrid Exchange organization.

• Accessibility: Microsoft is trying to make EAC mouse free & have a keyboard shortcut CTRL+F6 to quickly navigate across EAC.

• Web Browser Platform support: EAC can support IE8, 9, 10 & Firefox 13+, Safari 5+ & Google chrome 20+ versions.

Because the EAC is now a web-based management console, you will need to access it by using your web browser using the ECP virtual directory URL. To find the ECP virtual director URL that you need to access the EAC, run the following command:

Get-ECPVirtualDirectory | Format-List InternalURL,ExternalURL

v     To download the EAC go the following link:  

 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973395.aspx?wt.mc_id=TEC_116_1_33   

Arun Special Note: EAC is fully RBAC-aware. This means that if a certain Feature pane is not applicable or unavailable due to underlying RBAC permissions, EAC will respect the same and not show the respective Feature panes. Additionally, EAC fully supports multiple forest topologies.

                                                            Thanks,

                                                     Arun Chaudhary.