Deviliscious said:
I want to be able to use outlook from my office and home.
What's the best way?
I'm thinking of this:
1. At end of day at work, copy pst file to webshare.
2. At home, copy pst file from webshare to local drive. Work as usual.
3. Before going to work, copy pst to webshare.]
4. At work, copy from webshare to local drive.
Is there a better way?
Can I synch my pocketpc device on both computers (home and work)
without any problems?
Is work using Microsoft Exchange as the mail server? If so, see if they
are willing to use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to give you remote access to
your mailbox at work. You connect using your browser to their OWA
portal to get onto their network to use their Exchange server to manage
your mailbox. You don't get all the features in OWA that you do when
directly connecting Outlook to Exchange.
You could also ask them about setting up a VPN (virtual private network)
that lets you connect to their mail server from your home. You connect
to their VPN portal which (usually) encrypts your communications so it
is secure over your ISP's network (and any other hosts between them and
your company's external interface to their network) so your Outlook
connects directly to their Exchange mail server. It's like using
Outlook at work except you are using Outlook from home: in both cases,
you are connecting Outlook directly to their Exchange server.
If work doesn't permit using a VPN, or they don't want to bother setting
it up and managing it, then you might be able to use VNC to connect from
home to your work desktop computer. Basically you remotely control your
work desktop from home to run Outlook from there to connect to whatever
is their mail server there. You see within a window on your home
desktop what you are running on your work desktop. This requires you
run a service VNC client on your work desktop to which you connect to,
so be sure to configure security in that client that lets only you
connect via authentication. You won't be getting past their firewall
without their permission which means they have to open a port for you
through their firewall that forwards to your host, so again you will
need their permission and help in setting up VNC so you can remotely
control your work desktop from home. Windows XP also has a remote
desktop client if you want to use that instead of VNC. If the version
of VNC that you use (VNC, RealVNC, TightVNC, etc.) doesn't provide
secured traffic via SSL connections, and if your company requires that
you use SSL for external connects through their router, then you'll need
something like sTunnel on your end through which VNC passes and SSL on
their end. Securing the logon via SSL is *not* the same as securing the
TRAFFIC (after the logon) using SSL. The free version of RealVNC
doesn't provide encryption of the *session* traffic but the Personal and
Enterprise versions do. But without the help of your IT dept in getting
through their firewall, it ain't gonna work. Since a VNC connect
through their firewall represents a security breach (because they cannot
scan your home desktop for viruses or control the installation of
applications through group policies).
If work doesn't use Exchange and you are stuck using a .pst file then
copying would work. However, importing would be safer than trying to
slide in a new .pst file in place of the old one: you merge the new .pst
file's contents rather than try to replace your local message store.
However, copying or importing the .pst file still won't do much other
than let you have anything other another copy of an e-mail that you
already received at the other location. Any e-mails you send won't be
from your work's domain when you are home (and the company may have
policies against you pretending to be their representative when sending
e-mails that originate from off their domain).
