Exchange 2003 and SharePoint--now play nice!

I just saw a posting about this in the Microsoft public newsgroups, and I thought it might be handy to put a remind about how to set this up. I'm doing this from memory, and I'll try to put up a complete, illustrated set of instructions later this week.

The real issue is mainly about how to get the incoming email to flow properly. Most people can configure the outgoing email settins the the SharePoint Central Administration without too much problem. It's the incoming that messes with their heads.

The basic mistake that usually gets made is that the admins configure the incoming email domain name to match the live domain name. The followon from this usually means that someone adds that namespace to the SMTP connector on the Exhange server. This is where the loop comes in. The name in the connector means that the Exchange server will likely try to send it to the connector's partner which will then do the MX record lookup, and find it's own ip address. It will take the mail and then look at all the connectors to see what route it should take, and it tries to send it back out. So it does an MX lookup. Do you see where the loop comes in here?

The easiest fix: Make the sure the incoming email domain namespace in sharepoint is different than the domain namespace of your Exchange environment, and then configure the smtp connector in exhange with THAT namespace, rather than creating the loop.

There, that's the real quick and dirty solution. Like I said, I'll try to get a more detailed explanation in here later

A quick tip for lists and libraries

A lot of people have never realized this, but it is possible to set up alerts for other people.

If you have the Manage List permission on a list and library, you can set up alerts that go to others.

This is especially handy if you are setting up a list/library that is using content approval and you don't want to use a workflow.

The process is identical to setting up an alert for yourself, with the exception that you can select other people (you can include yourself, but you don't have to) to be the recipients of the email.

Nothing earthshattering here, but something I've found handy along the way.

Fun with Content Types

Here's a little tip for all of you SharePoint fans out there--

Remember that you can reduce the time and effort involved in creating and managing your custom content types by using a custom content type as the parent.

In other words, put all of your common metadata in a single content type, and then create document or task specific content types that are based upon the one you created before.

Also make sure you put your custom content types at a high enough level so you can use your content types everywhere you wish.

Here's a link to a good overview of how to create content types.

Searching MOSS from Office

To add a SharePoint Search Centre service to the list of sources to be searched via Office, you will need to do the following:

1. Open up the Office Application, and then open up the research pane.
2. At the bottom of the Research Pane there will be an option labelled "Research Options". Click on it.
3. In the "Research Options" dialog box, click onthe button labelled "Add Services"
4. This will open another diallog box named "Add Services". In the "Address" text box enter in the URL of your search service.

In SharePoint 2007,this url is http://yoursitenamehere/_vti_bin/Search.asmx

Now users can search MOSS's indexes straight from their Office Application