The Advantages of the Local Web Storage System

By Peter Pawlak

The Local Web Storage System (LWSS) was based on the Exchange 2000 Web Store and had most of the same characteristics and capabilities of its parent. Like the Web Store itself, the LWSS also ran on the JET-based Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) and supported MAPI, WebDAV, ADO, CDO, Active Server Pages, and WebForms, so applications written for Exchange 2000’s Web Store could also run against the LWSS. However, unlike the Web Store (which requires Windows 2000 Server), the LWSS could run on all current Windows operating systems. Shuttling data between the LWSS and the Web Store involved a replication system based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that was far superior to the replication mechanism in past versions of Outlook. Because the replication service no longer used MAPI, clients could replicate over the Internet without requiring special virtual private networks and could take advantage of Exchange 2000’s front-end processor architecture, allowing it to scale better.