Networking For Dummies, 10th Edition

Chapter 17

Connecting from Home

In This Chapter

Accessing your e-mail with Outlook Web Access

Using a virtual private network

A typical computer user takes work home to work on in the evening or over the weekend and bring back to the office the following weekday. This arrangement can work okay, except that exchanging information between your home computer and your office computer isn’t easy.

One way to exchange files is to mark them for offline access, as I describe in Chapter 3. However, this approach has its drawbacks. What if someone goes to the office on Saturday and modifies the same file you’re working on at home? What if you get home and discover that the file you need is on a folder you didn’t mark for offline access?

What about e-mail? Offline access doesn’t give you access to your company e-mail account, so you can’t check whether you have mail in your Inbox or send mail from your company e-mail account.

This chapter introduces two features that can alleviate these problems. The first is Internet-based access to your e-mail via Outlook Web App (OWA) in Microsoft Exchange. The second is the virtual private network (VPN), which lets you connect to your network from home as though you were at work so that you can safely access all your network resources as though you were ...