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 great to see the feedback keeps coming! A few more answers here:
Robert: I think DJ's hint above about staying tuned for Beta2 to see what we did with categories in OWA is the best answer for you. As I said above in reply to someone else, you'll be able to make your calendar look like a christmas tree if you feel like it with the OWA category support in Beta2.
Lee: In Exchange 2007 we are making a big investment in making it much cheaper for customers to provide large (2GB+) mailboxes to their users by improving Exchange's store technology so you can use cheaper hard drives. We believe storing email and calendar data on a server is a better long-term strategy than having that data stored on each client because clustering, backups etc. make the data access more reliable when it is stored on a server. But if your company for some reason doesn't increase quotas to the point where you don't really have to worry about deleting much mail, then Outlook is the solution for you. Users who need offline access to their mailbox data, or who need client archiving are not among the users we target for OWA-only mailbox access.
Anton: OWA can't authenticate using RADIUS or LDAP; it only authenticates against AD using Kerberos. IIS does the authentication for OWA. But you can deploy ISA2004 or ISA2006 in front of OWA to do "pre-authentication" and that pre-authentication can use RADIUS. You should never deploy Exchange 2003 FE or Exchange 2007 CAS servers in the perimeter network since they need to be domain members to do the AD authentication. To have OWA authentication in the perimeter network for all traffic before it reaches OWA, you need to be using "pre-authentication" on a reverse proxy such as ISA. One of the most importan reason ISA invested in pre-authentication and RADIUS authentication support was to provide great "pre-authentication" for OWA.
You won't be able to set folder permissions through OWA in RTM. Users who need advanced features need to have Outlook.
Dan: OWA2007 will have UI for users to "open other mailboxes". To get to that UI the user must already have opened a mailbox though. There won't be anything like a "select your mailbox; in addition to your username" on the logon page. The OWA2003 mechanism of putting the SMTP address of mailboxes in the OWA URL will also work to open other mailboxes.
Robert: I think DJ's hint above about staying tuned for Beta2 to see what we did with categories in OWA is the best answer for you. As I said above in reply to someone else, you'll be able to make your calendar look like a christmas tree if you feel like it with the OWA category support in Beta2.
Lee: In Exchange 2007 we are making a big investment in making it much cheaper for customers to provide large (2GB+) mailboxes to their users by improving Exchange's store technology so you can use cheaper hard drives. We believe storing email and calendar data on a server is a better long-term strategy than having that data stored on each client because clustering, backups etc. make the data access more reliable when it is stored on a server. But if your company for some reason doesn't increase quotas to the point where you don't really have to worry about deleting much mail, then Outlook is the solution for you. Users who need offline access to their mailbox data, or who need client archiving are not among the users we target for OWA-only mailbox access.
Anton: OWA can't authenticate using RADIUS or LDAP; it only authenticates against AD using Kerberos. IIS does the authentication for OWA. But you can deploy ISA2004 or ISA2006 in front of OWA to do "pre-authentication" and that pre-authentication can use RADIUS. You should never deploy Exchange 2003 FE or Exchange 2007 CAS servers in the perimeter network since they need to be domain members to do the AD authentication. To have OWA authentication in the perimeter network for all traffic before it reaches OWA, you need to be using "pre-authentication" on a reverse proxy such as ISA. One of the most importan reason ISA invested in pre-authentication and RADIUS authentication support was to provide great "pre-authentication" for OWA.
You won't be able to set folder permissions through OWA in RTM. Users who need advanced features need to have Outlook.
Dan: OWA2007 will have UI for users to "open other mailboxes". To get to that UI the user must already have opened a mailbox though. There won't be anything like a "select your mailbox; in addition to your username" on the logon page. The OWA2003 mechanism of putting the SMTP address of mailboxes in the OWA URL will also work to open other mailboxes.