Outlook Web Access has gone through many improvements over the years, starting as a very basic web interface and has been building up to a thin client replica of the Microsoft Outlook client. With Exchange Server 2010, OWA appears to be a fully mature edition.
OWA now lets you group messages by conversation, grouping all messages that originated from a single message and all the resulting replies. This is not a big deal if you are just going back and forth between one other person in the organization, but if you are receiving feedback from 10 or 100 people in your organization, you’ll can easily keep those messages together.
To help protect people from sending damaging or embarrassing messages, Exchange Administrators can configure Mail Tips. This feature is implemented similar to how Outlook Rules work and can provide users with a warning when an email is being sent to an external recipient, to a large distribution group, or to someone who is currently Out of Office.
User can now perform more powerful searches from Outlook Web Access, similar to what is available in the full Outlook client. You can search by recipient, whether attachments were included, and many other common search criteria. You can also set your favorite searches so that you can reuse them with a single click of the mouse.
Presence information is now integrated into Outlook Web Access allowing you to immediately know whether a person is available, busy, or not available using a green, yellow, red color coding. Depending on how important your message is and the recipient’s status, you can decide to Instant Message the person, another feature that is integrated directly into OWA when the Microsoft Office Communications Server is also implemented.
Finally, one of my favorite features now is the SMS Sync feature. By using Exchange ActiveSync, you can configure the server to automatically send out SMS text messages to your cell phone. This feature is also configured using rules, so whenever you get an email from a particular client, you can have a notification sent directly to your phone.
Posted Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 10:58 am by peterl
Tags: Exchange Server 2010, OWA
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