OWA as primary mail client?

[Sentro]

Hi all,

 

This may already be talked about but couldn't find a thread. Is anyone using OWA as their primary email client for users. We've just upgraded to 2010 from 2003 and with the new OWA we decided to offer only that client for users. We've only been running about 2 weeks with it and had some moans and groans but mainly due to the fact it's just different. Anyone else had any experience with this setup.

 

From a technical point of view we find it much better.

 

Gareth

[imiddleton25]

we use OWA for student but staff have the choice of full outlook or OWA using 2007 till half term then upgrade to 2010

[FN-GM]

In my last place we used outlook for all staff and students. We used a little app to run on logon to configure outlook for the user. For the life of me i cant remeber the name of the app

[rh91uk]

We use Outlook for Staff (configured by GPO.....you can set it to set up the profile upon logon for Office 2010 in the admin templates) and OWA for Students.

[jcollings]

Students all use owa. Staff have a choice but I would say 80 to 90 percent use owa. The ones who use full outlook tend be admin people who sit with outlook open all day. We use 2010 version and staff seem to love it. Had lots of very positive feedback about owa

[DrCheese]

We have used OWA as our primary client since exchange 2007 RTM. We simply didn't see the point in having two clients for users to learn (Outlook internally and OWA externally). OWA, especially now in 2010 sp1 is more than capable of doing the tasks that 99% of email users need and has pretty much the full feature set of the "fat" outlook client

All settings (signatures/rules blah blah) are stored in OWA rather than on a local client.

 

We do have a few admin staff who had pop3 email accounts years ago before we installed exchange who used outlook back then and we've kept them on that and we do allow staff who are based on the same computer all day to use it if they request it (i.e we have it..)

 

With IE9, OWA will get even better with notifications on the taskbar like the fat client (see http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/09/inside-internet-explorer-9-redmond-gets-back-in-the-game.ars/4)

Edited September 19, 2010 by DrCheese

[localzuk]

How do you handle staff needs for archiving old emails? OWA doesn't have archive file capability AFAIK.

 

I have about 2GB of archived emails, and other staff all have archives too. Or do you allow them to have unlimited space on the mail server?

 

Or delegate access to calendars and mailboxes?

[DrCheese]

To be honest, the majority of our users never use the calendering features, given that their teaching schedule is on SIMS. A few SMT users do use it but they manage fine with the OWA version and some of them have granted their CSAs access to add/modify events on their calenders.

 

As for archiving, we've yet to have any users hit the limit after running it since 2007 RTM'd, but whist I've not looked into it yet, I believe exchange 2010 allows you to create a separate database just for archived emails based on policy

[john]

I am going to change so that students use OWA only as there on a mix of Outlook and OWA at present (as Outlook is on all machines so some just choose it), I agree that OWA in Exchange 2010 is very good I don't mind using it and happily have done for days at a time in the summer when doing our LAN transition.

[srochford]

Is there a reason not to give users a choice? (eg you're running Open Office and the license cost would be prohibitive)

 

If you've got Office 2007 (or 2010) on the desktop I can't see a reason not to let users make use of it - by all means recommend OWA and suggest it as the primary email client because there is simplicity to having just 1 client.

 

If you've got Office 2003 then I seem to remember that it doesn't autoconfigure (so users going to a "new" machine may have to set up Outlook which leads to support calls because they get it wrong! If this is the case, you can add a preferences file to Office which will tell it to use Exchange etc and that removes a lot of the problems.