Remote Connections

The easiest to set up and the most universal of remote connections is via the web. If you have an internet connection anywhere in the world, you can read and respond to your email through the web interface at this URL: http://exmail.oregonstate.edu/. Choose Exchange 2000 Outlook Web Access and in the first logon box, type your login name on the departmental server and then click where indicated. In the next dialog box you must type the name of our departmental server followed by a slash (/) then your login name (no spaces, for example, roots/scottn). Press [Tab] and put in your password for the Roots server. This is not the same client software as Outlook and it does not have all of the functionality, but the advantage is that if you can get to the internet, you can get to your mail and usually without long distance charges.

If, however, you have Microsoft Office 97 installed on your computer at home and you are running Windows 95 or 98, you can configure your home computer to access your Exchange account and synchronize your mail folders. This option provides you with access to all the features of mail as if you were working in your office. Configuring your computer is a multi-step process.

1. Set up access to campus on your computer. This can be done through UCS if you have an account.
2. Make sure that Outlook has been installed on your computer. Double click on the Mail and Fax icon from the Control Panel. You should have in your profile the Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook Address Book if you use Contacts to manage your personal addresses. It is not necessary to be connected to the internet yet, but in order to ‘check name’ you must be.	Highlight Exchange Server and click on properties to bring up the second screen shown above. Rather than APOLLO, your server is MTBAKER.
3. Click on the Advanced Tab and the Offline Folder File Settings and store the offline folder file in an appropriate place. You should not change the name of the file, but if more than one person in your household will be accessing mail this way, you should store the file in the profiles directory rather than in the main level Windows directory. Each user of your computer must have a unique exchange.ost file.	This process will create a mirror file of the user’s Exchange Server mailbox in the directory specified.
4. Next, set up the computer’s network neighborhood from the control panel. From the control panel, right click on the Network icon and select properties to display the screen to the right. You must have at least the two services, one adapter, and two protocols. If you do not, press Add to add them. Click on the [Identification] tab and make the default workgroup = Roots.
5. Double click on the Client for Microsoft Networks to select the following parameters for logging on to our Windows NT domain. Make your screen look like the one to the right and then click on OK.
6. From ‘My Computer’ double click on the Dial-Up Networking icon to display connection information that you set up in the first step. Right click on the icon for your connection and select properties.
7. Click on the ‘Server Types’ tab. The settings should be as you see them to the right. Click on the [TCP/IP Settings] button to open the next screen and make your settings match those on the right.
8. Finally, connect to the modem pool using your UCS account username and annex password. After the dial-up networking screen disappears, the system will attempt to log into the Roots server and NT Domain. The system may ask for additional passwords; this is the same password used to log into Roots, regardless of whether or not it displays this fact.	After connection has been established, start Outlook. Several minutes will pass while the user is authenticated and the offline folders are set up. Once this is complete, select Synchronize/All Folders from the Tools menu. If you have a large number of messages in your mailbox, this may take quite a while. This process will mirror all of the files and messages kept on the server to the local hard drive. Thereafter, you need only synchronize folders if you make changes. Then only changes are passed over the phone line to your Exchange mailbox. Once you have created the mirror copy of your folders and synchronized, you can disconnect, read and compose mail. Any mail that you ‘send’ is stored in your outbox and will be sent when you reconnect.