SCP is good for me

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Customer today asked me about Outlook 2007 clients. They are planning on doing there schema update for Exchange 2007 and curious what this does to the Outlook 2007 clients. The 'service-connection-point' class is defined in the schema and the SCP objects published in AD contain information that various applications can use to direct clients to bind to a particular service.  Exchange 2007 makes use of SCP's to advertise autodiscover service information specifically.

Clients, such as Outlook 2007, will search against a GC to locate SCP's in the forest by querying AD for objectclass=serviceconnectionpoint.  In E2K7 during the setup of the Client Access Server role autodiscover will create an SCP object (obviously with an objectclass of serviceconnectionpoint) under the container:

CN=Autodiscover,CN=Protocols,CN=<CASServer>,CN=Servers,CN=Exchange Administrative Group,CN=Administrative Groups,CN=First Organization,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services

By default the serviceBindingInformation attribute of this object will be updated during setup with the autodiscover service url:

https://<CASServerFQDN>/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

The client will follow this url to determine configuration information for some mobile devices for example, or to provide access to the OAB.

This url can be changed using the set-clientaccessserver cmdlet with the parameter -AutodiscoverServiceInternalURI.

To find out more about autodiscover have a read of this whitepaper on Technet: 'Exchange 2007 Autodiscover Service' 

Figure 1   The Autodiscover service process for internal access

Autodiscover functional process

For external access, the client locates the Autodiscover service on the Internet by using the primary SMTP domain address from the user's e-mail address.

Depending on whether you have configured the Autodiscover service on a separate site, the Autodiscover service URL will be either https://<smtp-address-domain>/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml or https://autodiscover.<smtp-address-domain>/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml. Figure 2 illustrates a simple topology with a client connecting from the Internet.

Figure 2 The Autodiscover service process for external access

Connecting to the Autodiscover service from the In