Networking For Dummies, 11th Edition

Chapter 24

Connecting from Home

IN THIS CHAPTER

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

This chapter introduces two features that can alleviate these problems. The first is Internet-based access to your email 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 locally connected to the network.

Using Outlook Web App

Most people who connect to their office networks from home really just need their email. If the only reason for accessing the office network is to ...