Sunday, September 6, 2009

OWA 2010 in Exchange 2010

One feature of OWA 2010 was more browsers than just IE, the minimum version of IE has increased to 7 however with the addition of Safria on Mac and Firefox 3.X achieving 99% feature partity with only the exception of S/MIME this opens up to multiple platforms. If you are a chrome fan you will still be forced into OWA light. You would not believe how many companies are still using IE6 as a baseline browser, which will force you to OWA Light.
Premium OWA with Firefox 3.X
One of my favorite items is that you now have the option to use IE7 or Firefox to view OWA premium. In Exchange 2007 you only receive the light version of OWA when using firefox but now you can see running Firefox 3.5 and will receive OWA premium
Conversation views
The new default view in OWA 2010 is conversation view, this view groups messages together in an attempt to provide an easier message grouping. One of the nice features of this the view will expose the entire flow of the conversation, as user s will be able to see messages in their sent items as part of that conversation.
Persistant inbox opening
This feature is similar to Outlook in which you can right click the mailbox and choose to open another users inbox. Even after logging of OWA the next logon this connected inbox will stay resident. I would say the only limitation here is you can only see the inbox at this time so if there are any subfolder you will not be able to see them in this view and will need to use the open other users mailbox feature.
Action Menu
When using the right reading pane a new button will appear called the action menu, when selecting this menu item a user will be presented with a number of actions they can performs on the message
The actions presented are 1. Reply 2. Reply All 3. Forward 4. Chat 5. Forward as Attachment 6. Mark as read 7. Create rule 8. Junk Email 9. Delete 10. Ignore conversation 11. Move to folder 12. Copy to folder 13. Open delivery report.
There are a number of new features on the action menu that was not available in Exchange 2007 : 1. Chat 2. Forward as Attachment 3. Ignore Conversation and 4. Delivery Report
Ignore Conversation
If you have ever been apart of the a large distribution list or email chain that you did not need to be apart of this feature can be one of your favorites. If you select the ignore conversation a rule is created in your mailbox to automatically delete any message related to this conversation.
Forward as attachment
You can finally choose to forward a message as an attachment with OWA 2010
Open Delivery report
One of the newer features that can assist users is the delivery report. This feature can allow users to validate that an email they sent or received has actually left the system, been delivered, or the message has been read.
IM Integration
Exchange 2010 has been designed to work with a number of IM products and to integrate with them allow for third parties to hook into OWA. If you are running Microsoft OCS 2007 R2 you will be able to take advantage of the IM and presence in OWA.
If you have federations with your IM system your OWA users will be able to chat with those users as well.
Archive Mailbox
Exchange 2010 has introduced an archive mailbox feature, at this time
Help About
This item may be one of the most under under used and some time controversial. In the top right on the inbox there is a question mark icon with a drop down menu. When the drop down is selected if users choose about a window will open and display all the users connection options. This feature is built to assist Admins with knowing what systems the user is connected too

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The blog is written to the share the knowledge mainly on Microsoft Exchange Server and other Microsoft product that experienced on day-to-day life.