PlantMetrics e-mailing with Exchange Server

rstech

Member
Join Date
Jan 2005
Location
Chatham, Ontario, Canada
Posts
211
Hello everyone. I am trying to get reports to e-mail automatically from a PlantMetrics system at one of my customer's sites. I can schedule the report with no problems and I can automatically print and save to file but I can't get the e-mail to work. According to the Task Manager the e-mail has been sent but the recipient never gets it. When I check the log files I see there is an error connecting to the server. I assume this is the e-mail server.

The customer uses Microsoft Exchange server which is on a different computer than PlantMetrics. PlantMetrics is installed on a computer running Windows Server 2003 SP1 and has Outlook 2003. Outlook works fine and can send and receive e-mails to/from the Exchange server.

I have a case open with Rockwell Tech support but so far we haven't got the problem resolved. I'm not an I.T. guy but it seems to me a program such as PlantMetrics can't just access a corporate Exchange server without some security credentials. As far as I can tell there is nowhere in PlantMetrics (RSBizWare) to set-up a user and password to access the e-mail server. Under the Production Server I have entered the location of the e-mail server but that's all they ask for. There is a Report username and password but nothing for accessing the e-mail server.

Has anyone out there set-up e-mails with PlantMetrics to access an Exchange server? If so, could you please offer some advice. Thanks.

P.S.
If I get a solution from Tech Support I'll post it here.
 
Your Exchange server almost certainly requires authentication - especially if it's not SBE. It can be set up to allow sending anonymous emails. I think you may be looking to open it up as an "SMTP relay".

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/prodtech/exchangeserver/excrelay.mspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324958

I don't know about PlantMetrics configuration - Rockwell tech should be able to provide options. Typically with email support you have a username/password, port, and option to use SSL/TLS.

You might try using your ISPs SMTP server as a test to ensure that everything works up to there.
 
Last edited:
surferb said:
It can be set up to allow sending anonymous emails. I think you may be looking to open it up as an "SMTP relay".
I was in contact with Tech Support this morning and they ran an e-mail test utility on the system and came to the conclusion that you describe above. My customer's corporate IT department is making some changes to allow the RSBizWare computer to send anonymous e-mails. Once they're done I'll give it another try. Thanks for the input and the links. I'll post my results when I have more to share.
 
Cool! I'm not surprised that BizWare won't deal directly with a "native" exchange server, but it's really trivial to support a password protected POP/SMTP server. I seriously doubt that your IT department will open up a corporate exchange server for anonymous emailing. Hopefully it isn't a big deal for them to set you up with something. In most cases your ISP already has an SMTP server that will allow anonymous emails from computers on its subnet.
 
OK, my customer's corporate IT department got everything straightened out. Turns out the mail server we were told to use doesn't use SMTP. So they gave us the name of another e-mail server to use that does use SMTP and allowed our computer to send it anonymous e-mails. Everything works fine now.

Thanks for the links tragically1969; I'll check those out.
 

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