Moodle & OWA

[IT_Man_Dan]

Good Mornin,

 

I'm building a new VLE for our school using moodle and am learning as I go.

So far I've got moodle working on our web server and am successfully authenticating users using LDAP. We have an Exchange 2003 server at the school and users use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to acces their emails. I was wondering if there's a way in which I can have it so that when a user signs into moodle it provides a link so that they can check and use email within the moodle platform without having to sign into OWA seperately?

 

This would just make it easier for the end user.

 

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Thanks in anticipation.

 

Regards

Dan

[secretlife]

Do you mean a link on Moodle which will automatically sign them into OWA?

[FN-GM]

Yep thats what he means and i have no idea if you can do it. But you could try this - Moodle.org: Modules and plugins

[TheFopp]

If you get something working Dan, i'd be interested in seeing it. Obviously if the kids are in school and logged on to a school PC then they should be able to go straight to OWA anyway without re-authenticating, but it would be nice if they could log into moodle from outside, and then have that authentication passed through to OWA then.

 

What would be really nice, if we could have a block in moodle that talked to OWA and would show if there were any new messages for the student that was logged on.

 

Things like this would be great as we try to make moodle the centre of attention as the students online homepage.... especially know that I've got SSO working with moodle!

[andykemp]

As Exchange allows you to provide POP3/IMAP access as well you should be able to write a block that checks the account via one of these protocols and indicates if there is a new message.

 

If you are concerned about the security implications of allowing open access to the exchange server externally you should be able to set up the firewall to only allow access on the appropriate port from the webserver...

 

I have to say I haven't tried it but there are some ideas here that might help:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=114043

[stm-tech]

I am surprised that this has not had more work on it. I would love a block on the home page that tells the user if they have unread messages, and gives them a link to open the messages.

 

Paul