Outlook Web Access 2010 - Me Likey!

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So I'm prevented from discussing Office 2010 features until we ship our first public beta but I can talk about Outlook Web Access 2010 now because OWA is developed by the Exchange Server team and that beta is public. You can see the list of features at - https://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/en/us/outlook-web-access.aspx - but I'll share my thoughts on just few:

1. Arrange by Conversation

This is the default view in OWA 2010 and takes about 10 seconds to get used to. If you get a lot of e-mail with multiple threads, Conversation View is awesome for automatically organizing messages in your inbox. Pay attention when deleting messages when in Conversation View. To delete an individual message, use the Actions drop-down menu within that message. To delete the entire conversation, just select the conversation in the message pane and delete. This is a small distinction but will save you from inadvertently deleting messages you want to save. Filter View is pretty cool too. Definitely try out this feature as well.

2. Calendar Sharing

The feature parity between OWA and the Outlook client has taken a major step forward with the ability to view shared calendars within OWA. I can finally see another person’s calendar side-by-side – Loves it!

3. Voice/Mobile Integration

Unified Messaging from Microsoft is the best thing since sliced bread. End users can set a lot of their UM options directly from within the OWA interface such as: Voice Mail PIN, Play on Phone, Voice Mail Greetings, Call Answering Rules, etc. We also support voice mail text preview. This feature is courtesy of Speech Server integration with Exchange. We use speech to text conversion so you can visually preview each voice mail message. Keep in mind that the feature is still beta so the conversion to text hasn’t been perfected yet. However, it’s nice to get a quick glance at the message when you are not in position to listen to the voice mail.

Nothing new to report on the Window Mobile Device front as of yet. You can still manage devices from within OWA 2010 just as you did with OWA 2007.

Lastly, hurray for text messaging!!!!! You can use OWA 2010 to configure SMS text messages for calendar reminders and voice mail notifications. Now as a Microsoft employee I would love nothing more than to see every customer using Windows Mobile devices. However, if you still insist on using iPhones or BlackBerrys or anything other than a smartphone (sidebar: is the opposite of a smartphone a dumbphone?) then you still get your notifications without having to do any synchronization.

4. Retention Policies

Microsoft introduced e-mail retention policies with Exchange Server 2007 - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998599.aspx. OWA 2010 and Exchange 2010 now allows system administrators to filter some of that control down the end user. I stumbled across this feature as I was playing around with OWA Options. Retention policies let you control how long items in your mailbox will be saved. You can apply retention policies to individual mail items, as well as to folders in your mailbox. You can also have retention policies applied to your messages automatically based on the way you've applied them in the past. Because OWA is developed by the Exchange team you will see this feature first in OWA 2010. How it will work in Outlook 2010 remains to be seen, but I assume it will be similar.

That’s all for now. As I said in a previous post I am running the Office 2010 Technical Preview on my production machine. Once the non-disclosure lifts I’ll give you the entire scoop.