Scott Bush

First off: OWA is Outlook Web Access, the web-based version of Microsoft’s e-mail, calendar, and contact manager. Typically you use it when you’re away from your work computer but need to check your work e-mail (to learn the latest office gossip or which benefit the company is cutting next; that sort of thing). Today, I’m using as I work from home.

Now, OWA is pretty cool, especially the latest version. (In fact, XmlHttpRequest, the technology behind most cool web applications like Gmail, was first developed by the OWA people.) However, the dirty little secret behind OWA is its mouth-breathing cousin, OWA Light. A great comparison of the two can be found here.

Having developed web apps before, I know about cross-browser difficulties, and having worked for a corporation I know about fiscally-driven business decisions. So I understand the OWA team at MS probably sat down and said “let’s give those losers on the Mac and Firefox-using counter-culturists something so the Justice department keeps off our backs.” Just kidding. Seriously, giving up some advanced features like adding/editing mail rules, viewing messages in conversation mode, and recovering deleted items seems justified. Other features are on the fence and probably only matter if you need them: accessing the Tasks module (I don’t even know what that is, so I don’t care) and viewing your calendar in anything but day view.

Some features are absolute essential and why they’re missing I can’t understand. My two biggies: message flags and search.

• Message flags - I organize my inbox and track what I need to do (in part) with flagged messages. Someone requests a change on the site but I’m too busy right this second to do it–boom, red flag. An e-mail with a website I need gets flagged green for reference. Sometimes I use purple or orange flags for a bunch of messages that come in for a specific project. Quite useful, but it’s missing. Why? Simple thing to do. Even if MS left out sorting or searching by flag, they could’ve implemented a simple drop-down menu with colors in it to represent the flags. There’s no cross-browser concern there.
• Search - I am a Gmail user (okay, fanatic might be a better term). It’s simplicity and power in search is amazing. OWA Light has no search… unless you want to search your contacts or address book. This is a non-trivial feature, I know. But honestly, something as integral as searching e-mail! Why wouldn’t they have included this at the expense of other features or simply said “even non-IE users need search!”

Okay, I feel better for having said my piece. I’m probably stuck with OWA Light until I get my nice new Macbook Pro where I can run Windows (at a decent speed) and use the desktop Outlook client.