Ways Outlook Web Access 2010 ROCKS - Part 4 of Many

Wow. Being able to delete 282 unread emails with the same subject has NEVER been so easy. OWA 2010 from Exchange 2010 includes conversation view, which allows you to do this� and yes, that is a right click context menu in IE, Firefox, or Safari.

Exchange 2010, Outlook Mobile 6.1 and Text (SMS) Messaging

One of the new Client Access Role features of Exchange 2010 is SMS messaging. The first thing to know about this� Exchange did not learn to speak SMS. Exchange doesn't dial a modem. Exchange doesn't do SMS, per se. Exchange does do Activesync. And the Activesync and Windows Mobile team made this possible. Activesync actually sends/reads/synchronizes text messages to your phone. So when a text is sent, it's sent from your phone because Activesync told it to!

First, lets talk environment. Exchange 2010 RTM, Windows 2008 R2. Mailbox and CAS are 2010. The mobile device is a Windows Mobile 6.1 - This requires a Windows Mobile 6.1 or better device. No iPhone, no Blackberries have this functionality.

Install Outlook Mobile 6.1 on your WM 6.1+ device - Download from Microsoft at: https://update.outlook.com/cabs/OutlookLiveSetup.cab

Thanks to Mike here for this link: http://evangelyze.net/cs/blogs/mike/archive/2009/10/06/wm-6-1-outlook-mobile-update-for-exchange-2010.aspx

Configure Acticesync to your Exchange 2010 CAS server(s), and the next time you go into text messages, your device will prompt you asking if you want to sync texts with Outlook. When you accept this, you will get an email like this one:

The link for this is: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd251212.aspx

When you log into OWA (or Outlook 2010 when available) you can send texts to contacts from OWA:

Exchange uses Activesync to instruct your device to text on your behalf.

When a reply is received to your phone, the next activesync (aka, when you get an email) will pull that text into your inbox:

Users can disable/turn off/edit this feature in OWA options:

Of course, this can be disabled entirely for all users of a CAS server using:

set-owavirtualdirectory -TextMessagingEnabled:$false

Or this can be disabled per user using new Exchange 2010 OWA Mailbox Policies!

Ways Outlook Web Access 2010 ROCKS - Part 3 of Many

Another single screenshot with multiple product feature notes.

• Although working in Exchange 2007 as well, the password change prompting is still awesome (if you are on Exchange 2003 or prior, web based password change was available, but additional configuration work)
  
• The filter by is an awesome way to sort and manage your inbox.
  
• There are no more sorting though "pages" of email in OWA. So one scrollbar that allows you to scroll past ALL email in a folder. (OK, Not quite pictured)

OWA 2010 and Mail Tips

One of the most impactful Exchange 2010 Client Access features are Mail tips. There's a lot more info and examples of what they can do at the MS Exchange Team blog here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/04/28/451193.aspx

You configure Mail Tips via Powershell. These are organization level changes. You can view them using Get-OrganizationConfig and configure settings using Set-OrganizationConfig.

Unfortunately, the Exchange 2010 documentation does not at this time have documentation for each of these fields, but this is the link in case this posting dates it self.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997443(EXCHG.140).aspx

MailTipsExternalRecipientsTipsEnabled		Default: False This enables Mail Tips for reply/all including an outside the organization user
MailTipsLargeAudienceThreshold		Default: 25 This is the limit at which the "large audience" mail tip is displayed. Larger organizations will likely want to bump this number North.
MailTipsMailboxSourcedTipsEnabled		Default: True This is what controls if an auto-response or out of office appears as a mail tip.
MailTipsGroupMetricsEnabled		Default: True This is the service that does group metric counts for groups and nested groups
MailTipsAllTipsEnabled		Default: True This is the main setting to enable/disable mail tips entirely.

Additional things to know

• MailTips only work on Outlook 2010 (not yet released) and OWA 2010.
  
• Unfortunately, custom logic mail tips are not available in the upcoming Exchange 2010 release. The above options are the extent of MailTip customization

Ways Outlook Web Access 2010 ROCKS - Part 2 of Many

Tonight I used Robin's Macbook Pro and Firefox to use OWA. Granted, I had to ask how to take screenshots, but I am a MS person, so it's not that shocking. It's REALLY refreshing to see the OWA experience carry through cross platform.

Ways Outlook Web Access 2010 ROCKS - Part 1 of Many

A few things on this single screen shot:

1. I am in Firefox
   
2. I just pasted my rich text format signature!
   
3. You can see from the URL that I am using /ecp, for Exchange Control Panel