PDM Professional Compatible with Office 365 for SMTP Messaging

When setting up messaging for SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional does it support Office 365 for messaging? The move to Office 365 from traditional in house SMTP mail servers such as Exchanges has prompted this question. Using Office 365 for messaging would allow greater flexibility with message configurations in PDM Professional.

According to SOLDIWORKS Microsoft Office 365 is not officially supported to be used with SolidWorks PDM Professional and messaging. Microsoft® Office 365® uses Exchange Online which is a cloud based email server solution. SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional does not officially support hosted or outsourced mail servers. SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional officially supports locally hosted SMTP servers, such as a Microsoft Exchange server.

The workaround would be to create an email proxy application that will act as an email forwarding application. When using a email proxy the SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional database server service will communicate with the local proxy application which then relays the email to the external SMTP mail server. 

One such proxy solution is the open source application "E-mailRelay" from http://emailrelay.sourceforge.net/

The setup process is simple and the attached document shows an example how to configure the application to relay SMTP emails to a corporate mail server. Hawk Ridge Systems does not provide support for configuration or troubleshooting of the email proxy.