Monday, March 31, 2008

Redirecting OWA URL with ISA Server 2006 (Quick and Dirty way)

In setting up Exchange 2007 OWA through ISA Server 2006, I realized that it would be a lot easier to tell users to access it via http://owa.domain.com as opposed to http://owa.domain.com/owa (which is repetitive if nothing else).

Problem is, there is no obvious way to do this in ISA or Exchange.  Fortunately I am not the first one to have this problem, and it has already been solved.  The short version of the fix is to set OWA up 100% according to whatever book, article, white paper you are already following.  THEN, add another web access rule point to the same site, except this time set it to Deny.  You don't have to get too fancy on the various settings, authentication, etc. and just use the same listener that you created for OWA.

Once the rule is created, make sure it is the one just above the main OWA access rule (I named the new one "Redirect OWA" so I would know what it was), and then go back in and on the deny page, set it to Redirect to your specific OWA subdirectory (http://owa.domain.com/owa).  It works great!

Here are the two resources that I found to be most helpful:

Thomas Shinder's Blog

Blog du Tristank (look in the comments)

**UPDATE** I have since found a blog that tells the correct way to do this (but the quick and dirty listed above still works fine).  Here is a link to my blog post about the correct way.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Josh,
Thanks for posting this.

I can't seem to get it to work. Even though I am redirecting to my working OWA site inside the deny rule, I get redirected to the standard ISA form rather than the OWA form.

With the deny rule enable even if I do use /owa I still get redirected to the standard ISA 2006 form rather than the OWA form.

have you seen this happen?

I also tried the other way Tom wrote up using /OWA\ no luck there either I am missing most of the icons when I log in. Of course Toms article is for OWA 2003 which would use /Exchange\ so I substituted /OWA\ since I am using Exchange 2007, still no luck.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Rich

Anonymous said...

Josh I figured out why this was not working I had to use "All users" rather than "All authenticated users" in the deny rule.

Thanks!

Rich

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