HTTP to HTTPS and OWA Redirection in Exchange 2010MustBeGeek

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After installing and setting up Exchange Server 2010, it is important to configure https redirection. By default, users will have to type https://mail.company.com/owa to get to access email using web browsers. If users don’t start with https, and just, mail.mustbegeek.com then they will get error, 403 – Forbidden: Access is denied. This is because the connection has to be HTTPS. So we want user to type, mail.company.com on their browser and redirect the page to https://mail.company.com/owa automatically without having user to type full URL. This article shows steps to setup HTTP to HTTPS and OWA redirection in Exchange 2010.

HTTP to HTTPS and OWA Redirection in Exchange 2010

The settings that are shown here must be done in each CAS servers if you have more than one Exchange 2010 server with CAS role. To make HTTP to HTTPS redirection open IIS Manager in Exchange 2010. Expand Server name, and Sites. Select Default Web Site.

From the features View, double-click SSL Settings option.

Uncheck Require SSL and click Apply. Require SSL here means that user need to type https:// then domain name, each time they browse webmail from their browser. Require SSL will also be unchecked for all sub directories as the setting will inherit to sub directories. So go to each one of them and check Require SSL except for PowerShell and PowerShell-Proxy.

Now let’s configure OWA redirection. Select Default Web Site again. From the Features View, Double-click HTTP Redirect option.

Check option, Redirect requests to this destination. Type external domain name to access OWA, mail.mustbegeek.com. Under Redirect Behavior, check option, Only redirect requests to content in this directory (not subdirectories). Choose Found (302) as status code. Click Apply from the Action pane. When you set this redirection it is also applied to all sub directories like, aspnet_client, Autodiscover, ecp, EWS, and so on. So we need to remove redirect from all these sub directories. Select aspnet_client and double-click HTTP Redirect from Features View.

Repeat above step for all remaining directories from Autodiscover to RpcWithCert. Click Apply after you are done with each directories. Now when you type mail.mustbegeek.com in the browser, it will redirect to https:mail.mustbegeek.com/owa automatically.