Hi. I'm DJ Schwend, a product designer working on the OWA team here in Exchange. I've put together this overview of the best new features in our Beta 1 release. We've made huge strides to improve t...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Thanks for all the feedback and comments! The OWA team is listening and out future plans are influenced by every request and question. I wish we could say 'YES!' to everything :).
A few more answers to above:
Christian: For Public Folder UI in OWA2007 I'll have to go with a 'no comment' at the moment. We are still planning for releases after RTM and we don't want to promise anything we don't know we can deliver.
Exchange Dude and Larry: As with previous OWA versions is it unsupported (but possible) to modify the OWA client side script files or images/icons. Customization like that can get overwritten by Exchange Service Packs and QFEs. We are planning to make OWA customization a little easier in the future, but you'll have to wait till after E12 RTM for most of those improvements.
Jalrok: The height of that banner is a touchy subject. Many tears have been shed and angry words spoken over the issue of vertical real estate in the OWA client :). It comes down to a balance between 1) optimizing the use of the vertical real estate for computer savvy users and 2) make it very clear to novice users where the browser menus/buttons end and the OWA client UI starts.
Many novice users confuse the IE "new - mail" command with the OWA "new - mail" command. To combat those misunderstandings we need a clear separator between the two pieces of UI. The height and 'empty' feel of the logo pane is intended to mitigate those issues.
James: I hope you saw the video Nathan put on the blog about OWA Light accessibility. He’ll be following up with some OWA Light eye candy showing off the Safari and Firefox experience before long.
Philip: Exchange 2007 has a whole set of improvements for resource and room booking. One of them is the ability to configure rooms to auto-accept meeting invites (if they are free at that time) through the OWA UI for the room mailbox.
Henrique: Same good and bad news for that question. With the Ex2003 S/MIME control you can read encrypted and signed S/MIME mail. That control won’t be supported in E2007 RTM though.
TC: OWA2007 will play very much nicer with URLScan than previous OWA versions since OWA2007 no longer puts email subjects and other user generated data in URLs. That said, I’m sure some little URLScan tweak will be necessary for OWA2007 interop even if most of the tweaks you needed for OWA2003 won’t be necessary.
Patrick: Stay tuned for Beta2 and the “open other mailboxes” feature (this is possible with OWA2003 using specific URLs, but we added end user UI for it in OWA2007). You won’t be able to open multiple mailboxes in the same OWA window, but it’ll be simple for a user to keep one OWA window open per mailbox they want to look at.
John: Sorry to disappoint, but OWA2007 won’t have the ability to do name resolution from the email compose form against contact folders outside the mailbox. This is something we are considering for future versions.
Rolf: We did usability testing on whether we should be talking about “rooms” (very specific, but a little limiting) or “resources” (very generic, but encompasses all kinds of things customers book for meetings). It turns out many users get confused when talking about “resources”. They don’t know what it’s referring to, and so they don’t even think of using the UI to try to book rooms. Since rooms is the (by far) most important/common resource people book, we decided to go with the specific term.
Joel: I’m not sure on the details about when IE shows sites as ‘suspicious’. But I would guess they show any site referred to as an IP (not a hostname) as suspicious. SPAM and Phishing filters in general also treat email with IP links as more suspicious.
Andrew: I know! I know! OWA2007 will show RSS feeds set up through Outlook12. But you won’t be able to subscribe to new RSS feeds using the OWA UI. It’s an interesting long-term question whether the browser, your messaging client or some web site if the best way to aggregate and read RSS feeds… Perhaps all of them should allow this? This is something for us to figure out in future releases.
Bernd: I’m sorry to say you won’t be able to specify the ‘from’ field in OWA2007.
Aaron: We aim to please. Please let us know what you like and dislike about OWA2007 and we’ll be keeping it in mind as we plan and build future versions. Thanks for the questions and comments!
A few more answers to above:
Christian: For Public Folder UI in OWA2007 I'll have to go with a 'no comment' at the moment. We are still planning for releases after RTM and we don't want to promise anything we don't know we can deliver.
Exchange Dude and Larry: As with previous OWA versions is it unsupported (but possible) to modify the OWA client side script files or images/icons. Customization like that can get overwritten by Exchange Service Packs and QFEs. We are planning to make OWA customization a little easier in the future, but you'll have to wait till after E12 RTM for most of those improvements.
Jalrok: The height of that banner is a touchy subject. Many tears have been shed and angry words spoken over the issue of vertical real estate in the OWA client :). It comes down to a balance between 1) optimizing the use of the vertical real estate for computer savvy users and 2) make it very clear to novice users where the browser menus/buttons end and the OWA client UI starts.
Many novice users confuse the IE "new - mail" command with the OWA "new - mail" command. To combat those misunderstandings we need a clear separator between the two pieces of UI. The height and 'empty' feel of the logo pane is intended to mitigate those issues.
James: I hope you saw the video Nathan put on the blog about OWA Light accessibility. He’ll be following up with some OWA Light eye candy showing off the Safari and Firefox experience before long.
Philip: Exchange 2007 has a whole set of improvements for resource and room booking. One of them is the ability to configure rooms to auto-accept meeting invites (if they are free at that time) through the OWA UI for the room mailbox.
Henrique: Same good and bad news for that question. With the Ex2003 S/MIME control you can read encrypted and signed S/MIME mail. That control won’t be supported in E2007 RTM though.
TC: OWA2007 will play very much nicer with URLScan than previous OWA versions since OWA2007 no longer puts email subjects and other user generated data in URLs. That said, I’m sure some little URLScan tweak will be necessary for OWA2007 interop even if most of the tweaks you needed for OWA2003 won’t be necessary.
Patrick: Stay tuned for Beta2 and the “open other mailboxes” feature (this is possible with OWA2003 using specific URLs, but we added end user UI for it in OWA2007). You won’t be able to open multiple mailboxes in the same OWA window, but it’ll be simple for a user to keep one OWA window open per mailbox they want to look at.
John: Sorry to disappoint, but OWA2007 won’t have the ability to do name resolution from the email compose form against contact folders outside the mailbox. This is something we are considering for future versions.
Rolf: We did usability testing on whether we should be talking about “rooms” (very specific, but a little limiting) or “resources” (very generic, but encompasses all kinds of things customers book for meetings). It turns out many users get confused when talking about “resources”. They don’t know what it’s referring to, and so they don’t even think of using the UI to try to book rooms. Since rooms is the (by far) most important/common resource people book, we decided to go with the specific term.
Joel: I’m not sure on the details about when IE shows sites as ‘suspicious’. But I would guess they show any site referred to as an IP (not a hostname) as suspicious. SPAM and Phishing filters in general also treat email with IP links as more suspicious.
Andrew: I know! I know! OWA2007 will show RSS feeds set up through Outlook12. But you won’t be able to subscribe to new RSS feeds using the OWA UI. It’s an interesting long-term question whether the browser, your messaging client or some web site if the best way to aggregate and read RSS feeds… Perhaps all of them should allow this? This is something for us to figure out in future releases.
Bernd: I’m sorry to say you won’t be able to specify the ‘from’ field in OWA2007.
Aaron: We aim to please. Please let us know what you like and dislike about OWA2007 and we’ll be keeping it in mind as we plan and build future versions. Thanks for the questions and comments!