CITES DS Exchange Services

On December 20, 2007, CITES Departmental Services applied Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 to the Campus Exchange  Service (see http://status.cites.uiuc.edu/status.cgi?ENTRY=STAT002858&CAT=CLOSED). The application procedure completed on schedule and successfully installed the service pack (for more information on the service pack changes, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676323.aspx).  The scheduled maintenance time was announced on CITES Status, and Exchange availability was minimally affected during the update process. Full availability of the Exchange system was restored by the end of the scheduled maintenance period.

While the update completed successfully, the DS team identified access issues with Exchange public folders, particularly with anonymous access to calendars maintained within public folders. Full access to Exchange Public folders was restored in the early hours of December 21, with the final fix to stabilize anonymous, non-SSL access to public folders occurring at approximately 4:30pm on December 21.

The necessary changes to restore full public folder access did cause a disruption in access for a portion of Mac Entourage users during the holiday period. The DS team became aware of this issue through e-mail messages and posted messages to CCSP. These access issues were traced to the use of non-SSL access from Entourage using the WebDav protocol to connect to the Exchange servers. Because of the holiday periodic and low frequency of access, the diagnosis and remediation process took longer than normal. Changes to access policy to allow some forms of non-SSL authentication re-enabled the affected Mac Entourage users on December 28. The DS Team has been tracking connections, since that time, and will continue to monitor access for any remaining issues. We greatly appreciate the help and communication we received from departmental IT staff in both assisting users and narrowing down the cause.

Departmental Services strongly recommends that all Entourage clients are configured to use SSL when connecting to the Exchange services. Unsecured connections are not supported as part of the overall service and are highly discouraged for reasons of security and information privacy.
For more information, questions, or assistance, please contact the CITES Help Desk (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/help, or 244-7000).  Mac Entourage users are also encouraged to consult with their local IT Support Professional for assistance in configuring connections to the CITES Exchange Service.