A Glimpse At Exchange 2010 OWA And SharePoint Foundation

OWN has had their hosted Exchange and SharePoint systems on Exchange 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 for a while now.

We just finished provisioning a client’s e-mail infrastructure and collaboration around OWN’s 2010 hosted Exchange and SharePoint products.

Since we have been so busy with other tasks, this is the first time we have had the time to take a bit of a dive into the new Microsoft offerings.

Outlook Web Access

Exchange 2010’s Outlook Web App (OWA):

Microsoft’s continued development of Outlook Web Access on Exchange has certainly been excellent. With each successive version we have seen vast improvements with each new release.

The changes from 2007 to 2010 however, are not quite as dramatic.

Outlook Web Access on Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2:

OWA 2010 does have a few key features out of the box that OWA 2007 did not though.

1. Mail: Inclusion of the Favorites section which is identical to the Office Outlook client.
2. Mail: Search Folders actually has the Unread Mail folder set up by default.
3. Mail: Recover Deleted Items is now a right click option in 2010 as opposed to digging through Options in 2007.

From there, the OWA Options management page is a lot more intuitive to use on 2010 than it was on 2007. Users will be able to find the items they want to use with a bit more ease.

SharePoint Foundation 2010

Once the services are provisioned by OWN, we need to log on as the SharePoint site admin to set a template.

When the template has been set up, we then need to create our contributor group and add our client’s users to that group. Any needed Sites and/or special permissions groups would be created from there.

This is the new SharePoint Foundation 2010 site:

The changes between Windows SharePoint Services v3 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 are quite substantial.

Note the layout and navigation changes. There are a lot of changes made in the SharePoint product. As a result, be prepared to either contract someone like Robert Crane who can customize the site quite quickly and efficiently or delve into the bits and bolts to figure it out.

Own Web Now and the Cloud

We have mentioned this before, but it bears mentioning again since developing alternate revenue streams for our business is absolutely critical to our growth and longevity.

1. We partner with OWN for our hosted Exchange/SharePoint needs because _we_ are the face of the hosted products to our client.
• We set the value and pricing for each OWN service we resell.
• We invoice our clients for those services ahead of time the same way our cell phone provider invoices us for next month’s services plus last month’s overages.
• Once the services are set up, we have that monthly residual that totally _kills_ any residuals we might get through other Cloud services vendors.
2. We partner with OWN because we get to work with _real_ and _knowledgeable_ people if we need support.
• Benjamin and Matt have been our primary support contacts and they have always come through for us.
• The OWN support team when called upon have been second to none.

While the Cloud and its impact have certainly been on the top of our minds lately, picking the right Cloud vendors is absolutely critical to the life of our business.

Even with the mainframe style of Cloud services, the client/customer will _always_ be in need of experts to facilitate their IT solutions and infrastructure. That’s another reason why we always need to be growing our expertise.

Those Cloud Solutions Experts need to be _US_! :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer