MonitorWare Knowledge Base

I'm a newbie, so please bear with me. My server is a Windows 2003 machine w/ Exchange. On my XP computer, I'm attempting to set up an Exchange email account on Outlook 2003, but I keep getting the message "The connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unabvailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action." I am using the same options for computers that are directly connected to the same switch as the server, but the computers I am setting up at going to be used from home. I thought that maybe I should VPN into the server first, but that didn't seem to fix the problem. And, yeah, I know about having to set up the options from the control panel first. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!