Carl’s Blog

I’ve mentioned this before, in my About Me page, but I just tried out a more current release of OpenChange and the Evolution mapi plugin, from this source: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/msuman:/evolution-mapi-provider/

This thing is so close to being totally sorted. I’m really impressed. The current build from the OpenSuse build farm service (19th Sept) has problems displaying the message body, but they are aware of this problem and believe it was introduced in a recent patch, so should be resolved shortly.

This is great stuff.

I had a chat with one of the developers on the #openchange IRC channel on Freenode, and he told me that RPC/HTTP support may well be here in the future!

It is possible to stop Outlook prompting for the user’s password when using RPC/HTTP (Outlook Anywhere / Outlook via Internet) on a client running Windows XP Home or Vista Home Edition. We already know how to do this on XP Pro/Vista Business, even if the XP Pro/Vista Business machine is not joined to the domain, by using “Manage Network Passwords” within User Accounts.

Home Edition of Windows does not have the ability to either join the domain, or save network passwords, so we have to configure the workgroup-based machine as if we were trying our best to integrate it into a domain environment.

As per my previous article, lmcompatibilitylevel was set to 2, mutual-auth not enabled, NTLM authentication, and the certificate was imported to the “trusted root certification authorities” store.

The Home Edition client was configured as if it was to be accessing a server in a domain. That is:

• Workgroup name was set to the netbios domain name of the company (OURDOMAIN)
• The user account name was the same as the user account in the domain. If this does not match, simply changing the account name in User Accounts will not suffice. All that does is change the “Full Name”, not the Username. It needs to be either done through “Local Users & Groups” within Computer Management (if that exists on Home Edition.. ?), or a new account must be created with the name exactly as the username on the domain.
• The user’s password on his Home Edition client was set to the same as on the domain. The user was instructed not to change his password.

The two users are not being prompted for their password when launching Outlook outside of the office. It’s been a couple of weeks now since I set them up.