Prepare Office 365 Exchange Online for a Riva EWS Connection

Article ID: 1249

Last updated: 21 Jan, 2020

Important Notice: This article applies to Riva On-Premise and Riva Cloud Corporate. These steps do not apply to Riva Cloud Company.

This article describes how to prepare for a Riva connection to Office 365 Exchange Online.

Riva supports connections to hosted and on-premises Exchange systems. If your Riva On-Premise server will not connect to Office 365 Exchange Online, refer to one of the following:

Note: Because Exchange (Office 365) hosted on GoDaddy does not include Active Directory integration, there is no way for Exchange admins to assign Exchange ApplicationImpersonation role permissions. Only Delegate Full Access is supported.

To prepare to connect to Office 365 Exchange Online:

Prepare an Exchange service account for the Riva connection.
Prepare corporate firewalls.
Confirm connectivity from the Windows host server to Exchange Online.
Prepare the user mailboxes that Riva On-Premise will sync.

Step 1: Prepare an Exchange Service Account for the Riva Connection

A connection to Exchange is established by Riva using the configured credentials of an Exchange "service user" that has been assigned permissions to access the mailboxes that will be processed. This user is required for corporate mode access to the mailboxes. Although newer Azure permission models allow for direct application access to mailboxes without a service account, this is not currently supported. Direct application access requires Azure administrator consent, and also grants access to all mailboxes, without the ability to restrict to a subset of mailboxes.

For more information, see How does Riva communicate with Exchange?

The Exchange service user used by Riva is referred to as the Riva connection user.

To prepare the Riva connection user:

Select an existing service account or create a new service user account, for example svc_rivasync.
Configure the user password to never expire or change.
Configure this user as a fully enabled Exchange mailbox user that is visible on the Exchange Global Access List (GAL).
Assign permissions in Exchange to enable impersonation access to user mailboxes. See Prepare Office 365 Permissions for the Exchange Service Account.

Step 2: Prepare Corporate Firewalls for Riva On-Premise Access to Office 365

Ensure that Windows and corporate firewalls are configured to grant the Riva server access to and from Office 365 Exchange Online using EWS (ports 80 and 443). See Firewall settings for Riva.

Step 3: Confirm Connectivity from the Windows Host Server to Office 365

On the Windows system that will host the Riva On-Premise server, confirm that you can log in to the Office 365 Portal and access Outlook Web Access using the Exchange service user account login credentials. Outlook does not need to be installed on this server.

Step 4: Prepare the Exchange Mailboxes That Will Be Synchronized by Riva

Ensure that each user mailbox that Riva will sync is ready:

Primary SMTP Email Address: Ensure that the user mailbox primary SMTP reply-to email address value in Exchange matches the primary email address value of the user's CRM account email address.
Global Access List: Ensure that the user mailbox is visible in the Global Access List (GAL). If Exchange-enabled groups will be used to add mailboxes to the sync policy, the group must also be visible in the GAL.
Initial logon to Exchange: Ensure that the user has logged into their Exchange mailbox at least once with Outlook or Outlook Web Access to create the mailbox folders, calendar, and address book.