Chapter 2: Exchange Clients

Chapter 2: Exchange Clients

Introduction

Building a robust and reliable server infrastructure is only one part of the messaging story. Clients are equally important. The good news is that Exchange is able to support a wider variety of clients as time goes by. The bad news is that there's possibly too much choice today. From a user perspective it's nice to be able to pick and choose between lots of different clients so that literally everyone could have a different client program on their desktop. In this scenario the server is the point of unification for all the different clients, making sure that everyone can communicate together. Unfortunately diversity of clients is often a support nightmare, so some intelligent decisions need to be taken up front to select the clients for deployment.

MAPI, or Messaging Application Programming Interface, is used by Microsoft to build high-end clients such as Outlook. MAPI was the only interface available to clients to communicate with Exchange V4.0, but the range of available interfaces expanded to accommodate popular non-proprietary (largely Internet) standards in Exchange V5.0 and V5.5 through the support of protocols such as POP3, IMAP4, HTTP, HTML, and LDAP. ¹


	1	POP3 is the third version of the Post Office Protocol, commonly used to connect Internet mail clients to mail servers. It is a basic interface in that it does not support the range of features commonly offered by high-end interfaces like MAPI. HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and HTML, the Hypertext Mark...

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Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5: Planning, Design, and Implementation

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