Integrating Portal Server with MS Exchange Server
I am trying to outline a solution for integrating MS Exchange with Portal
Server. I realize that this can be done through the Exchange Netlet in iPS
3.0, but this will enable Outlook client access on the users machine through
the portal, and is not what we are looking for. What we would like to
provide is calendar (appointments, tasks, etc.) and mail information within
a channel on the portal. We would then provide a link to the web-based
interface for Exchange within the channel. The interface is simple, since
web-Exchange provides a URL, although any insight on providing SSO to the
application would be helpful.
Is there a way we can interface with Exchange using Java-based wrappers to
retrieve the calendar and mail information for a specific user? It seems
like the NetMail and iPlanet Calendar Server implementations would be
overkill for what we are looking for.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Here are some of my
thoughts:
1. Since Outlook has a web-interface(provides a URL), we can obviously serve
the web application up through the portal.
2. iPlanet Portal Server 3.0 NetMail. This will provide us with an IMAP
interface to the contents of the mail server, allow a user to send emails,
read emails, create folders, change folders, etc. This seems to provide a
full-fledge email application, which may be more than we actually need. Is
there any way to use the Java NetMail Servlet or the NetMail Lite version to
get what we are looking for?
3. Using iPlanet Calendar Server for the appointments and schedule, although
I believe that Exchange does not conform to the iCalendar protocol
specification? Again, this is a full-fledge calendar application, and seems
to be overkill for what we may need.
4. Using a netlet to connect to Microsoft Exchange server, which can be done
with Portal Server 3.0 because it implements the Microsoft Exchange/DCE
protocol. Again, this provides Outlook client access, and I am not sure if
this is what we want. Can we use the NetLet to capture the information
being retrieved from exchange and display it using JSP rather than s
5. Writing a Java wrapper to the contents of the mail server using the Java
Mail API, although this does not solve the calendar problem. We can then
display whatever info we want on our JSP pages using the wrapper classes.
Sean.
Sean.Coyle@us.didata.com
