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
It’s interesting to see some viewpoints on the topic of OWA Firefox support. I realize I don’t have much of a chance to dispel all the conspiracy theories out there with anything less than actually adding Firefox support to OWA Premium :). But as I said above the browser support we have for OWA Premium and OWA Light is really all about the browser’s and version’s usage share among our customers and the development and test investment it takes to support additional browsers/versions. We have limited resources, limited time and a very large set of potential features. Firefox support for OWA Premium wasn’t high enough on the priority list to warrant the cost.
It’s pretty cheap for us to add support for additional browsers to OWA Light, since we don’t have many advanced AJAX behaviors in that app. But OWA2007 Premium is among the most advanced AJAX applications on the planet and there are literally hundreds of small browser specific tweaks and modifications we would need to figure out to make it work flawlessly in Firefox.
The cost of making OWA Premium work in Firefox is going down continuously because IE and Firefox are getting more in sync. If the collective Exchange customer benefit, across all our customer categories, of OWA Premium Firefox support outweighs the development and testing investment it would take for us to add that support, we would add Firefox support for OWA Premium. That’s the same framework we use to evaluate other potential OWA features. Eg. We made the same tradeoff when we decided not to support OWA2007 Premium in IE5.5.
For now, you should check up on the OWA Light blog post which we will be posting soon. I think you’ll find that Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape etc. users will have a pretty nice email and calendaring experience with OWA2007 despite OWA Premium being restricted to IE6+.
To answer Joe’s comment about leveraging the Windows Live Firefox support in OWA, I can shock you with the news that Windows Live and OWA are completely separate applications and don’t share any code. The goals of a consumer email client are very different from what our corporate customers ask for. OWA is all about the corporate customers with Active Directory integration, Conversations views for users who receive 200-300 emails per day, advanced calendaring features, Voicemail integration, Exchange ActiveSync integration, Sharepoint integration etc. etc. Windows Live has a very different set of users with different feature requests. That makes it simpler to keep the teams separate since we would never be able to agree on prioritization and design of features if we were building one product together.
On that note a comparison between Gmail and OWA is also interesting. I think Gmail is a pretty cool web mail client. I would have a hard time using Gmail as my corporate mail client since it lacks some of the features I’m addicted to from being an Outlook user for many years. But for consumer email it’s certainly in the game with Yahoo and Windows Live when it comes to ease of use and other features.
I can’t help but mention my biggest pet peeve with Gmail though (yes, I know I’m throwing rocks in a glass house here and I’ll never stop hearing about something Gmail does better than OWA2007 :) ); why are the reply and forward buttons at the bottom of email I open? I had a friend try out Gmail recently and I did an improvised usability test on him, running him through the set of tasks we test novice users with in OWA. He failed the critical and simple task of replying to a long email he had received. This happened because he never scrolled to the bottom of the long email body to look for the little “reply” link down there.
If anyone working on Gmail is reading this: please move the reply/forward buttons to the top of the email bodies. Or perhaps just add them to the top of the page as well?
Btw, if anyone reading this blog has similar pet peeves with things OWA could do better in terms of usability, I’d love to hear about them. Silly usability issues like that should be caught in usability testing and there is no big investment decision to make about fixing them or not.
On to the specific questions above:
Stefan: I’m not going to ruin the suspense of waiting for Exchange2007 Beta2, but I can give you a hint that you can make your calendar look like a Christmas tree if you’re really into using categories.
JS: OWA2007 won’t have much shared calendar support when we RTM. I personally really miss this feature. It’s definitely something we are looking at for future releases.
Jeff: Voting buttons is one of those features that we want to add in each release, and every time something more important goes ahead of it in the priority list. I can assure you it is on the list as we consider features for each release we do. Some day it’ll be in OWA. It just isn’t used enough (in Outlook) by our customer base for us to have made that investment yet. Whereas voting buttons are used a lot by a few customers/users, there are so many other features we need to add which are used occasionally but by many more customers/users.
Bronco: Since you give that ultimatum, does that mean you promise to upgrade to Exchange 2007 if we have a Browsable Address Book?
I think you’ll be very happy when you see the Browsable OWA Address Book I mention above in response to Jesse’s question on the same topic. There may still be other features in the MessageWare plus pack you’ll like (eg. the ability to use a non-AD LDAP directory for OWA address resolution), so if you like it for OWA2003, you could evaluate the version they are building for OWA2007 as well.
sh00kie: Users won’t be able to see shared calendars inline in the OWA UI. But You will be able to view calendar folders from other mailboxes using OWA “web parts” in Sharepoint or other portal products. I hope that answers your question.
/K
It’s pretty cheap for us to add support for additional browsers to OWA Light, since we don’t have many advanced AJAX behaviors in that app. But OWA2007 Premium is among the most advanced AJAX applications on the planet and there are literally hundreds of small browser specific tweaks and modifications we would need to figure out to make it work flawlessly in Firefox.
The cost of making OWA Premium work in Firefox is going down continuously because IE and Firefox are getting more in sync. If the collective Exchange customer benefit, across all our customer categories, of OWA Premium Firefox support outweighs the development and testing investment it would take for us to add that support, we would add Firefox support for OWA Premium. That’s the same framework we use to evaluate other potential OWA features. Eg. We made the same tradeoff when we decided not to support OWA2007 Premium in IE5.5.
For now, you should check up on the OWA Light blog post which we will be posting soon. I think you’ll find that Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape etc. users will have a pretty nice email and calendaring experience with OWA2007 despite OWA Premium being restricted to IE6+.
To answer Joe’s comment about leveraging the Windows Live Firefox support in OWA, I can shock you with the news that Windows Live and OWA are completely separate applications and don’t share any code. The goals of a consumer email client are very different from what our corporate customers ask for. OWA is all about the corporate customers with Active Directory integration, Conversations views for users who receive 200-300 emails per day, advanced calendaring features, Voicemail integration, Exchange ActiveSync integration, Sharepoint integration etc. etc. Windows Live has a very different set of users with different feature requests. That makes it simpler to keep the teams separate since we would never be able to agree on prioritization and design of features if we were building one product together.
On that note a comparison between Gmail and OWA is also interesting. I think Gmail is a pretty cool web mail client. I would have a hard time using Gmail as my corporate mail client since it lacks some of the features I’m addicted to from being an Outlook user for many years. But for consumer email it’s certainly in the game with Yahoo and Windows Live when it comes to ease of use and other features.
I can’t help but mention my biggest pet peeve with Gmail though (yes, I know I’m throwing rocks in a glass house here and I’ll never stop hearing about something Gmail does better than OWA2007 :) ); why are the reply and forward buttons at the bottom of email I open? I had a friend try out Gmail recently and I did an improvised usability test on him, running him through the set of tasks we test novice users with in OWA. He failed the critical and simple task of replying to a long email he had received. This happened because he never scrolled to the bottom of the long email body to look for the little “reply” link down there.
If anyone working on Gmail is reading this: please move the reply/forward buttons to the top of the email bodies. Or perhaps just add them to the top of the page as well?
Btw, if anyone reading this blog has similar pet peeves with things OWA could do better in terms of usability, I’d love to hear about them. Silly usability issues like that should be caught in usability testing and there is no big investment decision to make about fixing them or not.
On to the specific questions above:
Stefan: I’m not going to ruin the suspense of waiting for Exchange2007 Beta2, but I can give you a hint that you can make your calendar look like a Christmas tree if you’re really into using categories.
JS: OWA2007 won’t have much shared calendar support when we RTM. I personally really miss this feature. It’s definitely something we are looking at for future releases.
Jeff: Voting buttons is one of those features that we want to add in each release, and every time something more important goes ahead of it in the priority list. I can assure you it is on the list as we consider features for each release we do. Some day it’ll be in OWA. It just isn’t used enough (in Outlook) by our customer base for us to have made that investment yet. Whereas voting buttons are used a lot by a few customers/users, there are so many other features we need to add which are used occasionally but by many more customers/users.
Bronco: Since you give that ultimatum, does that mean you promise to upgrade to Exchange 2007 if we have a Browsable Address Book?
I think you’ll be very happy when you see the Browsable OWA Address Book I mention above in response to Jesse’s question on the same topic. There may still be other features in the MessageWare plus pack you’ll like (eg. the ability to use a non-AD LDAP directory for OWA address resolution), so if you like it for OWA2003, you could evaluate the version they are building for OWA2007 as well.
sh00kie: Users won’t be able to see shared calendars inline in the OWA UI. But You will be able to view calendar folders from other mailboxes using OWA “web parts” in Sharepoint or other portal products. I hope that answers your question.
/K