Exchange Plugin 8.0

Requirements

• MS Exchange Server 2010, 2013, 2016 or Exchange Online on Office 365
• Enable Exchange form based authentication at the server-side.
• A valid Exchange SSL Certificate
  The certificate is required to establish a secure connection with the Exchange Server through OWA.

JCMS interoperates with the MS Exchange Server to get Exchange items through the secure HTTP protocol (HTTPS) by using form based authentication.

Installation

• Follow the PluginManager installation process.
• Restart the site.

Configuration

Plugin

Once the plugin has been deployed, go to the plugin administration page set the following common properties:

• The connector to use: e.g ews (for Exchange Web Service provided by Jalios SA). It is a required property. (Syncex is no more used)
• Microsoft Exchange server Domain: e.g company.com. This property is required with Syncex connector.
• Microsoft Exchange Server host: e.g myServer.company.net. It is a required property.
• Microsoft Exchange Server version: 2010. This property is required and it is set to 2010 by default. If Office 365 or Exchange 2016 is used, the version should be  2013.
• Use impersonation feature: e.g The property should be set to true if impersonation is used (see further),
• Impersonation user: e.g The user used for impersonation feature,
• Impersonation password: e.g The password used for impersonation feature,
• Keep connection information: if you want to store user connection information for the next time.
• Connection request timeout: the timeout for the connection request (in second), by default it is set to 0 (unlimited or unused). This property is optional.
• Request timeout: the timeout for requesting data from Exchange server. It is also set to 0 second by default. This property is optional.

Some users may have a different MS Exchange configuration (i.e. different OWA server). For those users, configure these two parameters in their profile.

Important: Note that the users in database (instances of DBMember) can not use a custom Exchange Server!

Be sure that your Microsoft Exchange administrator will accept to enable authentication through Exchange web services. In the case that he can't, so you can only use OWA Frame porltet.

syncex connector is no more supported.

The Exchange Server requires a secure channel to connect. Therefore you must create or edit the client secure communications certificate in the IIS Exchange Server properties. If you haven't got privileges to create the secure certificate ask your Exchange server administrator to do that for you or create one by the web browser. After that put the generated certificate into your JRE security directory JAVA_HOME\{JRE_DIR}\lib. You can also dowload the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools to do it easily.

Before using the Exchange portlets with Internet Explorer, you must add the OWA server in the list of trusted sites in Internet Security options. For this, Go to Tools > Internet Options > Security tab, select Trusted sites, click on Sites and add the URL of the OWA server.

Impersonation feature

This feature permit to acces to exchange data with a single application account (not a user one). Nevertheless, to use this feature, the application account must have rights to impersonate and to consult user datas (mailbox, tasks, ...).

Configuration of the impersonation : Help about configuration can be found on Microsoft documentation

Office 365 support

The module is compatible with Office 365 product (specially Exchange Online at the date of the release). To configure it, you should use following parameters :

• Echange domain : myCompagny.onmicrosoft.com
• Exchange server host : https://pod51013.outlook.com (See next paragraph for more details)
• Exchange version : 2013

The exchange server is the server indicated as IMAP server in Office 365 OWA.
To get it, click on Options -> See more options -> parameters for POP, IMAP and SMTP.

Impersonation can also be used. See here for more details.

Portlets

Add the Exchange portlet types in your workspace. Create the Exchange portlets. If those portlets are intended to be used in the Virtual Desktop, select the Service ability for each portlet.

Calendar Portlet:

To view exchange appointments with the Jcms calendar events use the plugin Calendar portlet and give it the ability to request Exchange appointments.

Common Portlet Parameters:

• Page Size: the size of the pager. By default there are 10 results per page.
• Exchange edition: it defines if the user can edit or not the Exchange data from JCMS. Default value is false.
• Max data (Task portlet and Mail portlet): defines how many data are fetched (default is 100).

Note related to OWA iFrame: If you use the OWA iFrame portlet and that you had a browser security message that tells you that the contents of the OWA iFrame is blocked, the you must to add the Exchange server address in your web browser trusted sites.

Members

This plugin creates a group for excluded members. Member belonging to that group is not allowed to connect to Exchange Server and it can't see and use the exchange's portlets.

So JCMS default administrator belongs to that group and he's not allowed to connect to Exchange Server. If you have some members that don't have exchange account we recommand to add them in the exchange exclusion group.

Limits

With OWA iFrame:

• Cookie with a very short life, need to refresh the portal or re-enter login and password
• Cross-domain: it is not possible to catch actions from Exchange frame (such as 'save and close', etc.), resize the frame
• ...

Migration

If your previous webapp has a 7.x (or lower), you must remove from WEB-INF/lib the following jars :

• jaliosews.jar
• webservices-api.jar
• webservices-extra.jar
• webservices-extra-api.jar
• webservices-rt.jar