Have you ever wished Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access worked more
like the Outlook desktop version? Mac users, Tablet users, mobile phone users certainly come to mind. Microsoft has constantly been evolving and improving their web interface for Exchange users. The upcoming release of OWA has been updated to align with the release of Exchange 2013 and boasts many new features and interface updates. It is clear the Office product team is collaborating with customers and working hard to evolve their product, openly asking:

So what do you think we should do next?
We’re very excited to finally share the new OWA, its updated Windows 8 style UI and added tablet and phone support. We can’t wait to hear your feedback on where to go from here!

For the uninitiated, OWA is a web page interface that allows email users to access corporate Exchange Mailbox information to send and receive email from remote locations. Of all the new elements and features, one of the most important is the expansion of the experience to additional mobile devices such as tablets, and mobile phones. This is a key lynchpin in Microsoft’s new strategy marked by a revolutionary new operating system, Windows 8 and foray into tablet computing devices.
Starting with the new Windows 8 style UI, the design looks familiar to the recently announced Outlook.com service and its refreshed interface with clean, yet feature-rich design. Microsoft states that 90% of the application code is shared between three UI modes –

• Desktop – designed for laptop, desktop systems it is optimized for mouse and keyboard input
• Touch-Wide – Designed for tablet devices – Optimized for touch input
• Touch-Narrow – Touch input optimized for smaller devices such as phones

The advantage of a consistent experience is that users don’t have to deal with different ways of interacting with their email when changing devices. For the enterprise, policies maintain in effect among devices.

Have you ever been in a location where connecting to the internet was just not possible? Take a lack of web access on flights for instance. Offline support is now incorporated in OWA, meaning working offline is no longer an issue. The release also unveils Outlook Apps. Outlook Apps is formed by a body of 3rd party web applications that integrate easily into OWA, eliminating the requirement for server-level installation of extensible applications. The list of available apps already includes Groupon, Twitter, LinkedIn and others and they apply to the standard version of Outlook 2013 due to standard JavaScript API architecture.

Email work flow and experience has been improved with new inline compose features, a departure from previous OWA incarnations that opened new windows when composing email. Other features include draft management, forgotten attachment detector, drag and drop functionality. Calendaring and user information, GAL integration and a whole host of other neat tuning of their product are found throughout the new interface.

Architecture in the enterprise email design has seen a significant change in that OWA logic processing has shifted to the mailbox servers themselves. This Exchange 2013 redesign has provided a simplification for load balancing, High Availability and failover design. The range of browsers supported in the full experience “OWA Premium” includes all the major most updated browsers. “OWA Light” extends a simplified interface and experience for alternate browsers.

In all, the upcoming OWA continues the evolution of Exchange access web experience in a fashion that addresses customer use cases, and usability, while simplifying the interface at the same time. The following story comes to mind. I was recently invited to do a demo in a bake-off compete situation versus another email service that starts with “G”. While the product I demo’d was actually Office 365, the users were interested in OWA functionality.  The subject was a company that was moving entirely to Mac hardware. The desire to minimize installation and maintenance of software drove the company to evaluating web interface email systems to fit into their plan. While the OWA 2010 version was quite feature rich, it still had a number of functionality gaps compared to Outlook. Offline functions, Calendar functions, a few little things but still OWA met all the significant functionality needs. The “other” product wasn’t even close.  This new OWA definitely takes it up a notch, or three.

The functionality improvements in this anticipated OWA release are clear evidence that the Microsoft product team is listening, exactly as is promised to those of us in the field. So yes, the question is relevant and the answers are heard, what do you think they should do next?