Microsoft Outlook Web Access 2007 - new features in Beta 1
Published May 12 2006 03:48 PM 27K Views

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 the online experience and our goal is to keep being the best web mail client in the world.

The user interface has been redesigned with a focus on productivity. We've reduced the number of clicks required to get tasks done. When possible, we've incorporated actions and responses in place; we call this "inline task completion" instead of opening multiple dialogs or property sheets. We've removed pop-up notifications to avoid those irritating pop-up blockers. We've enhanced drag and drop functionality, improved and expanded the right-click context menus, and integrated better error strings contextually so they don't get in your way.

Logon screen

If you're an OWA user today, you know how annoying it is that you sometimes (always?) forget to select 'private' logon which will give you a timeout of several hours instead of the few minutes you get with 'public' logon when accessing OWA from home. To fix this, the OWA 2007 logon page will remember your 'private' selection and the username you entered on those trusted machines between OWA sessions so you only have to enter your password the next time you log on. There is also a checkbox here for the 'Light' version of OWA here too, for the Mac and browsers other than IE6 and 7. It's also optimized for Accessibility, making it easier on users with low vision and screen readers. Look for a post on that version of OWA here soon. We've also updated the look and feel of the screen, along with the rest of the product. Check it out:

Mail

E-mail appears automatically as it arrives in your Inbox and the unread counts in the folder tree stay up-to-date so you no longer have to press the "Check Message" button over and over again to see if you have received that important email you've been expecting.

Also in the folder tree, we've enhanced drag and drop functionality from the mail list. You can drag and drop single or multiple items from the mail list into folders and interact with those items by right clicking and choosing actions within the menus. The right-click folder tree context menu now includes:

- New folder creation and in-place folder renaming (no more dialogs). Just choose the type of folder you want (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks) and right-click to choose "Create New Folder" from the menu.
- "Mark All as Read" action for folders
- "Empty Folder" to delete all items in one click - a new Option to empty the Deleted Items folder on log off is also provided in the new Options pages.
- New integrated Reminders drop down from the folder title area. You can choose to hide these temporarily by one click outside the menu, or dismiss individual or multiple appointments by clicking the Snooze or Dismiss buttons. This isn't a pop-up so it won't be blocked, and you won't miss an appointment.

- Since the browser won't let us render things outside the browser window anymore due to WinXP SP2 security enhancements, the New Item Notifications are also presented integrated into the OWA folder title area (not a pop-up from the Windows taskbar). This appears in a small menu with the subject and sender name shown for 5 seconds before fading out from the main window while you're working in any module (including Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks). Clicking on the notification will select the newest item in the Mail list, even if you're in another area like Calendar or Contacts. Different notifications exist for each type of item: mail, voice mail and fax. So if you're expecting a fax or a phone call you'll be sure not to miss it. You may turn Notifications and Reminders off completely in the Options pages.

Mail Toolbar

Click New to open and compose a new e-mail. Here, you can add names and addresses easily with the new auto-complete menu that remembers recently-used items so you don't have to:

Right-click on resolved names to view Properties such as: office, phone, e-mail, availability and their position in the organizational structure within the company:

- Access messaging options to set importance, priority, and request read receipts
- Use the HTML editor to change fonts, add color or add a hyperlink to a document
- View message headers for e-mail
- Adjust the Reading Pane that's shown on the right by default. Options include Off, Right and Bottom. Some new Reading Pane Preview features for meeting requests include integrated meeting conflict information and response buttons:

- Change the mail list to single-line view instead of the default double-line view
- Delete items
- Check for new messages
- "Arranged by" control incorporated into the mail list allows for custom sorting. Depending on the sort selected (Date, Conversation, From, To, Size, Subject, Type, Attachments or Importance), the list supports "typedown search" meaning that you can type the first few letters of the "From" name or "Subject" and the list will scroll to that entry.

- Oh, and let's hear it for our new Conversation View: hooray! Almost as good as a thread compressor (almost):

Search

In the Mail module, Search is shown as one field above the mail list that will search across the currently selected folder or user-selected location provided by a drop-down menu. Search scoping choices include: selected folder, selected and subfolders, or all folders and items:

To initiate a search, simply type in the Search field and either press enter or click the Search icon. Hmmm, just like Google. To Clear the Search, press the Clear icon that appears in place of the Search icon after searching or click away to a different folder or module. Search is also included for Contacts, Tasks and the Address Book.

Calendar

The Calendar has been completely redesigned with tons of added functionality and visuals:

- New calendar views for daily, weekly, and work week including a new Reading Pane preview available for all views so you don't have to double click to open an appointment to see the full details

- New visuals with transparency during drag and drop actions and colored free/busy status indicators
- Enhanced Date Picker with current date selection and view settings reflected for daily, weekly, work week
- Improved, integrated date-based navigation including next and previous buttons and hourly timestrip with "now" indicator:

- In-place "Create New Calendar" function for multiple calendar management
- Double-click to create a new appointment at the desired time on the calendar surface
- "Smart" scheduling with integrated free/busy status indicators for each meeting invitee, meeting time and room suggestions, and a room picker with most recently used menu for frequently used meeting locations. No more convoluted searching for rooms!

Options

New Options page format, separated into sections for each feature area. Some new features here include:

- An enhanced Out of Office Assistant that allows you to create messages, set your Out of Office for a specific period of time in the future (this is great, because you can set it up in advance and you don't have to remember to turn it off):

- You also get to choose if you want to send a different message to external recipients. We also have new Out of Office notifications to remind you that you have this feature turned on, or turned on for a specific timeframe:

- Change Password
- Mobile Device Options provide access to active devices through Exchange. You can view your last sync time, access your password or initiate a remote data wipe to protect your information if you leave your phone in a taxi (oops!)
- Voice Mail and telephone access settings:

- About Outlook Web Access: Troubleshooting and product support information helps pinpoint potential problems

These are only some of the best Beta 1 features. Wondering about colors and flags? Junk e-mail management? Document access? Stay tuned for more new OWA features coming this summer, in Beta 2.

From all of us on the OWA team:

We hope you enjoy Exchange 12!

- DJ Schwend

73 Comments
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The #1 thing I believe would enhance OWA:  Browseable GAL

Anything like that on its way?
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What happened to Month view in the calendar?  Bring it back! Please.
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Looks like lots of needed improvements, how well does OWA work in browsers besides IE?  Specifically Firefox.
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It is good to hear we will see message headers.   I assume this means the entire SMTP email headers.  Thanks.
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Would like OWA to display the  -Notes- attribute  for Distribution Lists.  In Outlook this is displayed from the GAL  >  Distribution List   >  Properties   >  General tab    >    Notes.  
Thanks.
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I would like to formally request that you guys work on the Basic/Limited UI for OWA as well, so that non-IE browser users can have an attractive, reasonable experience as well as IE users. There are many organizations-- Academic institutions, for example where I work-- that do not have the luxury of requiring an IE-only environment, but we'd feel equally bad about saying, "Well, use IE or else you get a limited, (and kinda ugly) UI."
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Question 1:
If I upgrade the front end servers to Exchange 2007 and do not upgrade the backend (cluster), what features of the new OWA are not available.

Question 2:
Is the address book still an LDAP search against AD versus the GAL/AL/OAL limited only by the msExchQueryBaseDN attribute?
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One thing My users Really miss is the ability to READ encrypted and signed e-mails from the OWA.
Will It be Possible?
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Hi,

It's exciting to see some feedback on OWA Beta1! Here are some answers.

Jesse: Yes, a Browsable Address Book is available in OWA2007. I think you'll be quite pleased when you see it. Come by the Exchange booth at TechEd in Boston in June and we'll give a demo, or wait for our Beta2 release to become available this summer.
Matt: The monthly calendar view is unfortunately covered by the "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" policy of our OWA rewrite. That is: we didn't have time to rewrite all the OWA features, so we had to plan on removing a few to start with an then add them back again later. We know the monthly calendar view is a feature loved by many users and it will come back at some point (but it is not in Beta1).
Joseph: Firefox users will get the "OWA2007 Light" experience, which is a much improved rewrite of "OWA2003 Basic". Listen in on the posts to the Exchange blog and you should see a post on "OWA Light" before long.
Mike1816: Yes, when you look at message headers through the OWA UI you'll be able to see all the messages headers expressed in the MIME of the message.
Aaron: See the answer for Joseph above. We will still have the best OWA experience only for IE6+ users in OWA 2007, but the non-IE experience has been dramatically improved. Which browsers we support with the best experience and the "Light" experience is mostly a matter of development and test costs. The support lists may change in future releases.
Brian: Q1: If you keep Ex2003 mailboxes you don't get the new OWA. The only OWA2007 feature your users get to enjoy are the updates for OWA Forms Based Authentication. Other than the authentication, users with Ex2003 mailboxes will continue getting Ex2003 OWA even with an Ex2007 Client-Access-Services server.
Brian: Q2: OWA2007 will be showing the GAL and let users navigate other Address Lists. msExchQueryBaseDN will still (as in Ex2003) be the mechanism available to show only subsets of the GAL to certain users.

/K
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I really like the new OWA experience. At the moment I have only one wish/complaint: The new self-provisioning of mobile devices is great. But PLEASE let the admin decide if users get this option or not(Maybe a new option on OWAADMIN...?). I see a lot of support calls coming in like "...I wiped my device accidentially, could you please bring back my data...".
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Oh, there's another one: Public Folder access. PLS!
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Henrique: I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is that if your users are using IE on Windows and Ex2003, they can go to the OWA options page and download + install the S/MIME ActiveX control and they'll be able to sign/verify and encrypt/decrypt S/MIME messages.
The bad news is that in OWA2007 we haven't gotten to adding S/MIME support yet, so you won't see this same capability in OWA2007 for a while.
Christian: I've got all good news for you. The administrator can turn on/off the ability for end users to manage their Exchange ActiveSync mobile devices through OWA using OWA "segmentation". You can do this "per OWA virtual directory" or "per user". To turn off the OWA mobile device configuration for the whole vdir, you can use the Exchange management Console, or execute this Powershell command:

set-OwaVirtualDirectory -identity "owa (default web site)" -MobileSyncIntegrationEnabled $false
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Overall, the look is great! But how easy will it be to customize it? 2003 takes a bit of knowledge of ASP and overall web dev to put our own company logos in it or change to login FBA page, much like mail.microsoft.com has. I hope you guys took into account how many of us customize the banners and intitial login screen to make the management happy without having our own web dev team.
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Hello,

I wanted to add onto what the Exchange Dude said.  A customizable wizard such as what's available from Citrix with their Web Interface 4.x configuration product (for Citrix Presentation Server) would be great so anyone could update logos, default views, template themes, etc.

thank you,
Larry
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Looks like another great upgrade, OWA2003 was great and this looks like a good evolution. One thing I see is that the banner at the top of the page takes up a lot of real estate. I think a banner 1/2 that size or even smaller would serve the functionality of the page better. Thanks for the team blog as well, it’s great to see the development process and have some effect (hopefully) on the final product.
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Since many people in my organisation use Firefox it would certainly be interesting to see what features the "light" UI includes (and more importantly, what it leaves out). I would hope that where possible the UI would be the same so that it's easy for people who sometimes use IE and sometimes Firefox.
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This looks really exciting!

One of the problems with OWA/Exchange 2003 is that you cannot "invite" a resource - the meeting request goes to the Inbox rather than directly booking it. I know that things are changing in Exchange 2007 anyway in this area by providing a different mechanism but can resources now be booked directly or is that mechanism deprecated?
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And what about the ability to READ encrypted and signed emails on the owa? Will have a solution for this?
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Has anything been done to fix the problem with OWA and the URLScan tool? The issue being the inability to read messages with certain characters in the subject such as "./", "", "..", ":", "%" and "&" as noted in KB325965.
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Is there going to be a way to open/authenticate to multiple mailboxes in OWA in the near future? That is one lacking feature that would be killer.
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Will Public Folder and/or Sharepoint contacts be accessable when composing messages?
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Looks really great, but why are you calling it "Select Rooms" on the scheduling tab for a new appointment.

why not call it "select resource" or something simalar?

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Thank you for taking the time to respond to our questions.

OWA2000 and OWA2003 show up as "Suspicous" websites in IE7 if the site uses an IP address instead of a hostname. Does OWA2007 do anything to remedy this?
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Anyone know if this will have native RSS functionality akin to the forthcoming Outlook client?
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It would great if the new OWA have the ability to use the "From-Field".
Is this Feature in scope?
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Thanks for your response, it is most helpful! You guys ROCK! :D
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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!
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The dealbreaker:



How does OWA2007 work in non-IE browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari)?


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OWA sucks, GMail rules
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Given that Windows Live Mail now fully supports Firefox in it's rich mode, how is it that OWA 2007 will not? There must be a huge amount of overlap in these two poducts. Please strongly consider the large Firefox user base out there which would love to avoid having an IE window open for the *sole* purpose of using OWA - I'm personally sick of it!

As a side note - great work, looks great and beats other options by miles!
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People people people...  This team has developed the most advanced web client EVER for accessing Exchange.  Let's let them keep developing, and quit asking them the same question over and over like "How's it work in FireFox?"  (emil) Duhhh, of course that's not their highest priority.  Read this screen before posting your questions, let's let them program!  :)

And Boris, I sure hope they don't even respond to your comment about Gmail.

GREAT work team, these improvements are unbelievable, I really respect what you're doing!
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Hi,

very cool thinks.

What is with the calendar categories. Would this also be possible over OWA2007 (didn't find it in OWA2003). And would it be shown with Colours like Outlook 2003.

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just to add to the noise: why is the client not AJAX-ified to provide a tier-one experience to browsers besides IE?  Was this a time-constraint issue?

I'd like the OWA team to look over Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com/products/screenshots.html) to see what kind of possibilities are available using that tech, or even review the Yahoo beta web mail.

A rich client experience CAN be provided using AJAX.  Love to see OWA be at par with the best, if not a leader!
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Will there be a "calendar overlay" option similar to what is planned for OL2007?  Or the ability to open other users calendars side-by-side?
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This has to be the weakest excuse ever for dogding the question when we all know the answer : OWA on non IE browser is crippled for 1 main reason: Microsoft doesn't want you using non IE browsers.  Get with it guys and realize that no one company controls the web and forcing limitations on non IE browser is about as 1995 as  you can get.  The largest software company in the world can't development, test and support the second most (and climbing) popular browser in the world?  Please.  I smell dirty politics and then some.  Dump the 'Light' experience and put those people on making it work THE SAME across ALL modern browsers.



Joseph: Firefox users will get the "OWA2007 Light" experience, which is a much improved rewrite of "OWA2003 Basic". Listen in on the posts to the Exchange blog and you should see a post on "OWA Light" before long.
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I can't believe that OWA still doesn't support voting buttons for messages created from the Outlook client.  With all the magic that OWA2007 does now, has any effort been made to accomplish this?
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Address book like the Messageware Plus Pack is essential or we are staying with 2003!!
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Great to hear that OWA users will be able to manage more mailboxes froma GUI. Will calendar viewing(of another user) require the complete seperate session as well as viewing the mailbox does.

BTW - OWAuser - get a clue. Other browsers are just as often as not closed source - and often they do not support the same features (advanced DHTML, XML, etc.) that IE does. Just because you want to run a buggy and just as security-problem-prone (but no method of letting you know of updates) browser that provides you the illusion of security (or more likely the feeling of being the |33+  H@x0r that you are) does not mean that Microsoft has to support it.
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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
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Thanks for your response Kristian. I fully understand that you guys need to define scope for your project to ensure you deliver the best possible experience to the largest chunk of the OWA userbase.

With regard to Firefox and IE coming closer to supporting standards in a consistent approach, I do applaud the IE team for going down this path.

You mentioned your framework for deciding browser support within OWA, specifically pointing out that usage is a key determining factor in making decisions about inclusion of a particular browser version into your support model. This model of support is quite dangerous, however I - and projects I have worked on - have used it in the past.

I raise the browser-share model as a dangerous model because usage share can be skewed when you cripple the experience of non-supported browsers. For instance - I use Firefox (or derivatives thereof) 99% of the time, however I always visit OWA with IE. I'd rather not, but the crippled version of the product is so much less desirable than the premium version that I find myself with no choice. Choice is the key word here, and I believe (no doubt some will disagree) that given the choice, OWA browser share may be significantly different to that currently reported with OWA 2003.

Hopefully, when IE6 support finally goes the way of IE 5.5 support, your team will be free to embrace standards and do away with browser specific hacks (a whole other topic).
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Thanks for the feedback Joe!

I agree with you it would be dangerous for us to use statistics like “how many customers/users use OWA2003 with IE” and “how many customers/users use OWA2003 with Firefox” as the determining factor of whether we add Firefox support or not. If we were doing that I agree that we wouldn’t be understanding how our customers _want_ to use OWA. We would only be understanding how our customers use OWA today because of limitations/designs we currently have in the product.
Our goal is to understand how our customers _want_ to use OWA, and make decisions based on that. So we don’t look at the browser statistics for “browsers hitting OWA” to make the prioritization decisions about browser support. We look at the browser statistics for “browsers used on the Internet” and “browsers used within our customer organizations” to make those prioritization decisions.
We also listen to what customers are asking for as a good measure of what they want since statistics never tell the full story no matter how many surveys, site logs or research firms we draw from.

On the other topic of “browser specific hacks” you mention, we actually already went down the path of not using any IE-specific mechanisms in OWA2007. OWA2003 made use of a few mechanisms like that, but since we were doing a rewrite we had the luxury of replacing those with mechanisms more generally supported among different browsers. So there’s not big piece of browser infrastructure OWA relies on which works only in IE. The decision about the browser matrix of OWA is all about the investment we allocate to OWA, and the need of additional browser support as compared to the need for all the other OWA features our customers want. Even now that we use only browser infrastructure commonly supported by more browsers there is a significant development and (even larger) test cost associated with supporting more browser types and versions.

/K
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@OWA user: Damn, you figured it all out!

I expect Bill Gates to hand over the reigns of Microsoft to Steve Jobs as soon as he has a chance to read your fresh and scathing comment on how Microsoft has the _nerve_ to develop for their own products first and foremost and only providing a fully functional UI for browsers they do not own or support.

And yes, Firefox is right behind Internet Explorer -- 60% behind...
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Two calendar requests
1 - non-premium browsers be allowed a monthly calendar view
2 - please provide a monthly calendar view that is only purely the calendar, showing every single item in the calendar on one HTML page - no scroll bars on each date, no "..." buttons - just expand the table cell for the date so it shows every single item so I can print it, I do not care if it doesn't print on a single page pretty, just need to see EVERYTHING - I cannot get such a thing from Exchange or Outlook right now, and it makes scheduling nearly impossible - however, open source apps like WebCal provide this right out of the box

Thanks.
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How can I get my hands on this?
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I live in OWA and 2007 is looks great.... Thank you
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Screw Firefox.
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tt: Thanks for the feedback. We will certainly think about that usage scenario for the monthly calendar as we design it for OWA2007. Most users of the monthly calendar have a different requirement from what you describe. They have a requirement that the whole calendar should fit on one screen at the same time so they can get a quick overview of what's going on that month. I can't promise we can address both these conflicting requirements, but I can assure you we will try to come up with a good UI doing just that.

Richard: If you'll be coming by TechEd in Boston in June I think there's a chance you maybe able to get your hands on a build of Exchange12. Otherwise we are aiming to have Exchange12 Beta2 out for public review this summer.
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Why don't you support colored appointment items in the calendar like Outlook does?
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What about archiving emails in personal folders (.pst)?  With an Outlook client, one can archive emails that way onto a local drive.  With OWA, there's no way to archive emails (or enlighten me if there is).  The emails reside on the server, and when the dreaded "mailbox is full" message comes from the administrator, there's no choice but to delete emails.  If the user has the "luxury" of accessing the same email account thru an Outlook client, the emails can be archived.  But it's not uncommon to have only OWA access.
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I know this may be a little off topic, but does anyone know why Exchange 2007 won't install on Windows "Longhorn" server beta2?  All the posts I see are people trying to install it on Windows Server 2003 and they get the MMC 3.0 error.  I get this on my Longhorn installation.  Doesn't Longhorn come with MMC 3.0?  Anyone know of a work-around so I can test this setup?  Thanks!
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Last update:
‎Jul 01 2019 03:14 PM
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