load of tosh : OWA

History of Outlook Web Access

Tosh Meston — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 20:24:00 GMT

My dev lead Jim has a nice history of OWA on the Exchange blog. He talks a bit about the early versions of OWA and describes how XMLHTTP came into being for the Exchange 2000 release and how it came to be installed with IE. Neat little piece of internet history.

http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2005/06/21/406646.aspx

Outlook Web Access Customization TechNet Articles

Tosh Meston — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 21:14:00 GMT

There are a couple new TechNet articles on customizing Outlook Web Access. These are two months old now, but given that I haven't posted in some four months, I'll consider them "new". In any case, they deal with creating custom UI themes and changing the appearance of the logon page. Sometimes our development team is forwarded screenshots of the OWA UI after it's been changed by customers and many of them are really fantastic looking. If you're interested in giving OWA a look that is customized for your org you should have a look here:

Thanks goes out to Don Mace for his work with these!

Outlook Web Access Calendar View Query-String Parameters

Tosh Meston — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 08:29:00 GMT

Monday I received an e-mail from James Buchanan asking what is the query-string parameter to bring up a monthly calendar view in Outlook Web Access. Actually, I am starting to get a lot of emails from people asking about this or that, which is great and I am happy to help when I can. I'll do my best to get back to your guys if I can help, but of course, I still have to write new code, which may make it impossible for me to get back to everybody. Funnily enough, I just received another email from the blog as I write this. This time it's just blog spam. Great. Where was I?

Right. James asks it is possible to bring up a calendar folder in the monthly view. The answer is yes. Your URL will look something like:

.../Calendar?cmd=contents&view=monthly

Additionally, you can specify the weekly view like this:

.../Calendar?cmd=contents&view=weekly

The view param is case-sensitive so anything but "monthly" and "weekly" will give you the daily view.

Thanks James.

Overriding Outlook Web Access's Display Language

Tosh Meston — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 08:46:00 GMT

As you know OWA's UI or display language is determined by the Accept-Language HTTP header sent up by the browser on each request. This is controlled by a value set in Tools / Options / Languages... Now there are times when an OWA administrator might wish to override the language requested and return something else. One way to do this (if you have access to your front-end box) is to create an ISAPI filter which re-sets the Accept Language. This is described in the following KB (knowledge base) article.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310599&sd=tech

(Thanks to Stuart Fox for the pointer)

Exchange Server TechCenter (redesigned)

Tosh Meston — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 00:59:00 GMT

The Exchange Content Engineering team (including a couple of characters I've been known to hit the espresso stand with) along with various other folks have released a revamped Exchange TechCenter on microsoft.com as a portal for finding technical information on our software. There's lots of good info up there if you're looking for more help or considering a upgrade or move to Exchange. Also as the Exchange blog was one of the first product blogs at MS there's naturally an RSS feed of recent downloads such as Exchange 2003 SP1 and various KB articles and tools. If you run Exchange and use an aggregator feel free to subscribe.

Creating header based rule in OWA ?

Tosh Meston — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 19:04:00 GMT

I received this nice e-mail asking about creating rules on more message properties than we support today in OWA 2003. Since Exchange has been around a long time and I've only been part of the team for one release, I thought I'd share when I learn something new as well.

Hello,
Thanks for publishing this blog. I found answers to some of the questions I had about OWA and exchange 2003.
I wonder if you can give some help about one specific issue I am dealing with OWA 2003. We are about to launch hosted Exchange services and some of our clients will have only OWA to access their accounts. In OWA, there is no option to create a rule using a keyword in the message header. Is there a way to do that or is there a modified control somewhere with more ways to create rules ?
Thank you
Turker Sokullu
Canada

There's a Rules COM component you might find useful for creating rules to act on additional message properties that is part of the Exchange 5.5 platform SDK.

Here is a KB article describing how to create a rule with the component in VBA:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=251125

Here is more information about the component in MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/exchserv/html/comcpnts_2qgk.asp

Hope that helps.

OWA Theme Fun

Tosh Meston — Sun, 15 Aug 2004 19:24:00 GMT

Nino Bilic provides the cool images and css for the OWA XBOX theme in a recent entry on the Exchange blog. Back in early 2003 when we were finishing up development on the product and many mailboxes at Microsoft were dogfooding our bits, OWA dev decided to show off the feature on April 1st. The dev building the feature came up with a Hello Kitty theme and arranged to change the default theme on everyone's mailboxes to the new Hello Kitty one, then segmented out Themes as a feature. The effect was that everyone had Hello Kitty UI and couldn't change it. We're so funny.

Setting Outlook Web Access Views on the QueryString

Tosh Meston — Sat, 12 Jun 2004 07:28:00 GMT

The other day I received an e-mail from a guy who read an entry of mine on the Exchange team blog who wanted to know if was possible to specify the view of one's Inbox on the querystring. Surprised that people (one anyway) find my inane prattle useful, I thought I would share my response to him here in the hopes of helping someone else out. The answer is yes! You can specify the view as a querystring parameter and it looks something like this:

https://server/exchange/user/inbox/?cmd=contents&view=unread%20messages

“view“ is the name of the parameter and its value is the localized and url encoded (so %20 == space) name of the view you want to show, in this case “Unread Messages“.

Hope that helps someone else. Let me know if you find it useful.

Outlook Web Access Administration Tool Released

Tosh Meston — Thu, 27 May 2004 06:59:00 GMT

I am happy to point to the download point for the new Outlook Web Access Administration Tool that our team has built. The tool is an installable web site which allows one to tune OWA registry settings. To quote the install point:

It provides a list of all servers in the domain and allows administration of OWA settings on all Front-end and Back-end servers. The tool ensures that settings are correctly written to the server’s registry and provides inline documentation for all configurable features.

We'd love to hear what all you think. Have an install and let me know.

Update [6/11/2004]:

KC forwarded me this review of the Admin Tool in Windows & .NET Magazine.

Update [6/16/2004]

Here is another review of the tool on MSExchange.org.

More Exchange Job Openings

Tosh Meston — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 02:45:00 GMT

Our blogging recruiters Zoe and Gretchen are highlighting openings in Exchange. Their post focuses the responsibilities of our Software Design Engineers in Test (SDET), but I also noticed an SDE opening on the Exchange programmability team today. This position reports to a very smart and nice guy. I guarantee you will learn something from him and he will probably even buy you a latte every once in a while. Of course, I mentioned earlier that there is still a dev opening on the Outlook Web Access team working with me. All three of these positions involve C# programming. Hey if you get the job, stop by my office and I'll buy you a latte.

Type down searching in Outlook Web Access

Tosh Meston — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 19:12:00 GMT

Sometimes in using your own software you take advantage of features that other people have no idea are even in there. This morning I was talking to some people who didn't know about our type down searching in the main viewer of OWA. Although they use it in Outlook, it doesn't register that they can do the same thing in a web app.

Here is the scenario:
In OWA, you know you have a piece of mail in a folder from "Tosh Meston", but there's a thousand messages in there so paging is not really useful. Most people would just bring up the Search dialog from the toolbar. But, another possibility is to click on the From column header to sort by From, then start typing T-O-S-H. After a pause, the viewer will seek out and position the list at the first message from Tosh. It works for subjects too.

This also makes me wonder if people are using our handy custom context menus. Maybe people do not think to right-click on web apps, except to do things in the default IE context menu. Web devs, what's your opinion? OWA users, what's your experience?

Job Opening in Outlook Web Access Development

Tosh Meston — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 19:06:00 GMT

Without sounding too much like a sales pitch here, I would like to put the word out that my team in Exchange, that is building the next great versions of Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Outlook Mobile Access (OMA), is looking for a solid developer to help the effort out. The job involves working with “Asp.net, C++, C#, DHTML, xHTML, XML, and new UI technology in Longhorn”. You will need to push IE to the limit. You will get to show off your creativity in building a UI that all of MS is proud and envious of. You will get to play with Whidbey and Longhorn. You will get to work with (or at least down the hall from) some other Exchange webloggers like KC and David.

If you're interested in this, apply by submitting your resume on the web site directly (not to me). This is the direct way to our recruiters. Good luck everybody.

Intl. Safe URLs to Outlook Web Access Modules

Tosh Meston — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 03:23:00 GMT

KC posted an OWA tip from me on loc-independent URLs to OWA views on the Exchange blog. Have to blog one's self, geesh.

Drag and Drop Attachments in Outlook Web Access

Tosh Meston — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 18:58:00 GMT

Here's an Outlook Web Access (OWA) feature that's in some ways little known. Although if you search for it, you can find articles talking about it. It's the ability to drag and drop attachments on to a message. What makes this possible is our S/MIME control.

Try it out. Install the S/MIME control from the Options page and then bring up a new mail message. Now select a couple files, drag them over and drop them on to the body of the message. They get added to the attachments list just like that. It's so much better than having to post each individual file attachment which is typical of a web app, don't you think?

Looking for more OWA tips, check out KC's blog on Exchange and Outlook.

Outlook Web Access Addressing Shortcut: Avoiding Ambiguous Name Resolution

Tosh Meston — Sat, 10 Jan 2004 09:03:00 GMT

Here is a handy little shortcut for you Outlook Web Access users out there, one that I use all the time.

Frequently I will type in the full alias of someone in the address book and expect it to resolve directly to the person I want. Let's say for example, the alias is “toshm” and this is who I want to reach, but there's also a “toshme” in there. The result is that you get the ambiguous name resolution dialog (what we on the team call the ANR dialog) popping up, asking you if you want “toshm” or “toshme”. This can get old after a while if you mail this person all the time, but there's good news. You can prefix an equals sign to the alias like “=toshm” and have it resolve directly to name you want. Pretty cool.