SBS 2011 and web access

In the microsoft SBS 2011 you can login to your server/network via a simple webbrowser.
For this the setup asks you the external dns name of your server and then magically configures everything.

So when you for example use: myserver.mycompany.com as server name, then you can access to the RWA (Remote Web Access) part with the url https://myserver.mycompany.com/Remote

The Outlook Web Access is found on https://myserver.mycompany.com/owa

So far everything is fine.
But when you now wish to have the users directly redirected to the webinterface of OWA when they enter the server url, then you have a problem.

http://myserver.mycompany.com is always redirected to https://myserver.mycompany.com/Remote

According to MS this is "By design" and can not be changed/modified.
Normal people would configure such a redirect in the IIS Manager and define the target url there. Apparently MS SBS developers are not part of the "normal people" group, they have probably hard coded this redirection in some dll, .net stuff or who ever....


In SBS 2008 server the same was also true, but you could at least hack it to make the redirect as you wished.


The recommendation for SBS 2011 is to setup a external website with some kind of webmail.mycompany.com URL and then make there a redirect to https://myserver.mycompany.com/owa

Very cool feature, the all-in-one solution of MS does require additional web servers to configure your server as you wish it.

The other readical solution to this problem is to completly remove the /Remote virtual stuff from your IIS (And loosing the corresponding functionality) and then just put a redirect at that level on the server....