I have been creating a demo VM to run some scenarios against and wanted to demonstrate the Outlook Web Access (OWA) Web Part capabilities. I installed MOSS 2007 and had it all running with POP3 and then installed Exchange 2003.

I noticed that the OWA wasn’t working in the Exchange System Manager ‘Servers|<server name>|Protocols|HTTP|Exchange Virtual Server’ and instructed me to go to IIS to configure the Port etc. The ‘Default Web Site’ was Stopped because it was sharing the same point as the main MOSS2007 web site. I changed the port number to an unused one and started the web site and this then allowed me to access OWA.

 

Configuring the Web Part needed a few modifications. I had to set the Mail server address to ‘http://<server name>:81/exchange’ (e.g. ‘http://awhsvsp01:81/exchange’) and the Mailbox to ‘<user name>’ (e.g. ‘Paul’).

    

It appears to be just showing the OWA in a IFRAME which obviously won’t please the Acessibility gurus of the world. What is does allow though is a quick view of OWA within each users My Site.

The My Mail Folder Web Part is also quite neat as it allows users to point to a specific folder within their outlook. This could be very handy when people are using common public folders for email on a project and can simply add this web part to see all the latest relevant email conversations.

Unfortunately there is no filters, for example to filter the My Tasks by category or priority etc. and the same for My Calendar. These filtered views would be more handy for custom workspace Web Part scenarios.