Exchange Public Newsgroups

By Scott Schnoll 19 Apr 2004 | SearchExchange.com

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The following are Exchange resources from "25 Exchange 2003 Tips in 25 minutes." This content is excerpted from Scott Schnoll's book, "Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Distilled," brought to you by © (2004) Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Addison-Wesley Professional. Return to the main page for more tips on this topic.

The public newsgroups are accessible via an NNTP newsreader, such as Outlook Express (and many others), and via the Web with Internet Explorer 4.0 or later or Netscape 4.6 or later. In addition to the English based newsgroups, there are Exchange newsgroups in several languages, including Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Korean, and others. Posts remain on the server for 90 days, after which they expire. You can find questions of all types posted by users with wide-ranging levels of experience. Newsgroup topics include installation, administration, clients, clustering, connectivity, design, development, and miscellaneous topics.

You can access the Web-based interface to the Exchange newsgroups by pointing your browser to http://support.microsoft.com/ne wsgroups/?pr=newsgexch2k. The newsreader can be used by pointing your NNTP client to msnews.microsoft.com. Microsoft does not provide official support for Exchange in the newsgroups. Instead, the company provides the newsgroups as a way to help people become part of the global community of Microsoft customers and product experts. The newsgroups do not have a Microsoft search interface; however, they are searchable through Google Groups (http://www.google.com/groups), formerly DejaNews (you can still get there using http://www.deja.com). You can use the same trick mentioned earlier for the Microsoft Knowledge Base to make Google and Google Groups easy to search through the Internet Explorer address bar. Use the following registry entries to add Google and Deja keywords to Internet Explorer.

To add Google, create this new KEY:

Location: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchURL\google

Then add the following values under this key (all are REG_SZ):

Value: Default
Value Data: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
Value Data: %26

Value: (space) ~ note this is not the word space but a single space Value Data: +

Value: +
Value Data: %2B

Value: =
Value Data: %3D

Value: &
Value Data: %26

Value: ?
Value Data: %3F

Value: #
Value Data: %23

To add Google Groups, create this new KEY:

Location: HKCUSoftware\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchURL\deja

Then add the following values under this key (all are REG_SZ):

Value: Default
Value Data: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%s

Value: (space) ~ note this is not the word space but a single space Value Data: +

Value: +
Value Data: %2B

Value: %
Value Data: %25

Value: &

Get more "25 Exchange 2003 Tips in 25 minutes." Return to the main page.

About the author: Scott Schnoll, an Expert on SearchExchange.com, is an MCT, MCSA and a long-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).

In addition to writing "Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Distilled," he is a co-author of the upcoming "Exchange 2003 Resource Kit from Microsoft Press" and lead author for "Exchange 2000 Server: The Complete Reference."

Scott has written numerous articles for Exchange & Outlook Magazine, and is a regular speaker at Microsoft conferences, including MEC and TechEd, as well as industry conferences such as Comdex and MCP TechMentor, where he covers topics such as Exchange, clustering, Internet Information Services and security.

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