The life of an end user is a difficult thing. They have to figure out how to get out of the bed in the morning, figure out how high tech tools like toasters, radios and televisions work, and how to turn on an automobile and make it move in the right direction in order to get to work. With all that happening even before they get to work, you can understand how they’re intellectually drained by the time they get into the office.

Why am I assuming that they’re intellectually drained? Because they can never remember to use https: when connecting to the OWA Web site.

OK, all kidding aside, one of the most popular requests among ISA Firewall admins has been the ability to easily redirect users who enter http://owa.domain.com/exchange to https://owa.domain.com/exchange Actually, we should give the users a break, because they normally never have to enter the protocol into the browsers addresses bar. We typically just enter the FQDN for the destination and the browser automatically adds the protocol for us.

The ISA Firewall team has heard your wishes and has included an easy way for you to redirect these requests.

1. In the ISA Firewall console, click Firewall Policy:
2. On the Toolbox tab, click Network Objects, expand Web Listeners, right-click the Web listener, and then select Properties.
3. Click the Connections tab.
4. Put a checkmark in the Enable HTTP connections on port and confirm that the listening port for HTTP is 80.
5. Confirm that Enable SSL (HTTPS) connections on port is enabled and is listening on port 443.
6. Select Redirect all traffic from HTTP to HTTPS.

Cool, eh?

HTH,

Tom

Thomas W Shinder, M.D.
Site: www.isaserver.org
Blog: http://blogs.isaserver.org/shinder/
Book: http://tinyurl.com/3xqb7
Email: tshinder@isaserver.org
MVP — Microsoft Firewalls (ISA)