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It came as a surprise to many of us on the early adopter program with Microsoft when on one of the very last builds of Exchange 2010 all of a sudden Outlook Web Access was renamed Outlook Web App. Same OWA for web mail as we’ve used for years, but just a different name. Why the different name? Because Microsoft is branding all of their Web applications as Web Apps like the new Terminal Services Web Access is Remote Desktop Web App and the like. Made for a lot of fun when we had written the Outlook Web Access chapter for my Exchange 2010 Unleashed book and were about to send the book off to final print when we caught the name change. Meant we had to scour thorugh the chapters for all uses of the term “Outlook Web Access” and change the name AND we had to redo 40+ screenshots for the book, but we caught it in time.

What what’s new in Outlook Web App other than the name? The biggest thing is that OWA now supports more than just Internet Explorer for Windows. In fact, OWA in Exchange 2010 (which we frequently shorten to OWA/2010) supports Safari for the Apple Mac, FireFox for various operating systems (including Windows, Mac, and Linux), and Google Chrome! And not just that it supports these various browsers, but it supports thebrowers in full “Premium Mode”, not in the limited basic “Light mode”. So for non-Windows users, you are no longer 2nd class OWA citizens!

Some of the other things you’ll find in the new Outlook Web App 2010:

• Conversation View:  this is new to Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web App 2010 has the same look and feel, that basically email threads are grouped together by conversation so that all emails, replies, replies of replies are all clustered together in your view
• Mail Tips:  this is also new to Outlook 2010 and OWA 2010 where the client software tracks policies and if you try to send an email with an attachment greater than the supported attachment size, rather than attemping to send the attachment only to have it bounce back to you, Mail Tips pops up and tells you the attachment is too big and tells you what the policy is regarding the attachment size allowing you to fix the problem before it is a problem.  Similarly, Mail Tips will notify you when you “reply all” and potentially send a message back to everyone when you really didn’t intend to do so
• Integrated Instant Messaging:  For organizations that have Office Communications Server 2007 R2, you can configure OWA/2010 and OCS/2007 R2 to have the “presence” screen embedded right within OWA.

All other traditionally known features are included in OWA/2010 like email, calendar, contacts, configuration options, out of office rules, spell check, etc.

In my next blog entry, tomorrow, I’ll post how to configure Outlook Web App 2010 with OCS 2007 R2 for integration of presence and Instant Messaging in the single OWA/2010 screen.

And I’ll post a third entry later this week on the new “Exchange Control Panel” in OWA/2010, a really slick feature that allows administrators to do administrative tasks right within OWA.  So instead of having to find a workstation and “terminal server” into an Exchange server or AD Global Catalog server to do things like add a user, delegate rights, create a public folder, modify public folder rights, look at Exchange queues, etc, you can now just go to Outlook Web App 2010 and go into the “Exchange Control Panel” to perform administrative tasks.