Email Enabled MOSS Lists
First let me apologize if you've commented and asked for a response. For whatever reason the blog here hosted at OZ with .TEXT doesn't email me when I get new comments and I've been so buried I haven't even looked. I will look through comments and see what I can do but please, if you really want a response, I'm more than happy to answer, just email me directly using julie at kremerfamily com. I promise if you write me there I will answer.
I have spent the past week, entire week, trying to get Email Enabled lists to work under MOSS Beta 2. I have a situation where I need to send some data into a workflow from an external process. Not only is the process external but the data will be coming from outside our organization... while I could potentially poke a hole through the firewall and have a receiving webservice, it seemed like a great idea to simply have the process email it's data directly to Sharepoint... afterall the security around Exchange is already in place.
It has been an absolute nightmare to get this working. First and foremost, I followed Steve's wonderful directions at combined-knowledge.com; however, it wasn't until after I fiddled for a couple days that, with the help of the brains at 3Sharp.com, that it was brought to my attention this can't work in a single VPC image (which is how I've been working).... soI then embarked on creating an entirely new Virtual Development environment using VS Server 2005. The problem is that I'm no network adminstrator. I don't know the first thing about IPs and DNSs and ActiveDirectory (well other than how to connect to it using System.DirectoryServices), network adaptors and whatnot. I'm sure half my problems have been related to the self-taught crash course I've given myself to setting up a network (I couldn't even find a book to help and all the step-by-step websites are for clustering servers).
7 days later... 7 DAYS later I have finally, successfully sent an email, via Exchange 2007 (which I also setup myself) to an email enabled MOSS list....
My virtual dev environment now consists of:
-- Server1: Windows Server 2003 with ActiveDirectory, Exchange 2007
-- Server2: Windows Server 2003 with SQL 2005, MOSS (and eventually all of my dev tools) and a Virtual SMTP Server
I still need to actually do the test of sending an email with an XML data attachment to the list but I'm so ecstatic that I got an email to show up that I have to take the rest of this beautiful Sunday afternoon off. It's a miracle.
I will create a step by step as soon as I get a chance... I think it will come in useful. Steve's guide is basically perfect; however, Exchange 2007 requires an SMTP Connection setup AND I think I could write a guide for people, like me, who know nothing about any of the server stuff... to help guide the settings... I had lots of problems with the settings.
I may move and host my blog on my own host site so that I can get comments and avoid spam. More to come.