Comparing OWA light to the standard OWA interface

Because you may want to use OWA Light or end up using it from time to time, I'd like to show you the features that are not available in OWA Light but only in OWA; and then I'll talk briefly about the benefits of OWA Light. So Outlook Web Access features that are only available in the full OWA version, include HTML Formatting for Messages. So OWA Light is plain text formatting only, which means you can type words and type characters, but you can't format them, bold them anything else.

There's no Spell Checker in OWA Light, only in OWA. There is no Reading pane. Each time you want to view a message in OWA Light you double-click to open it. You won't receive Reminders and you can't set them for events. There is no right-click menu anywhere in OWA Light; and we'll use the right-click menu a fair amount in OWA, along with drag and drop. So there's no drag and drop capability and no right-click capability. And there is no Favorites group of folders or Favorites area you can add folders to in OWA Light, only in OWA.

If you need to access public folders, you can only do that in OWA; you can only create and edit your own Distribution List there, although you can use Distribution Lists from your global address book, when you're in OWA Light. There are no MailTips in OWA Light or Message tracking to find out if your messages have been delivered or to assign delivery options. There is no Advanced search. There's regular search in OWA Light, and it runs really fast. But if you need to do a more advanced search, that's only available in OWA.

In the Calendar you have a very flat, basic, one-day calendar in OWA Light. You can't share calendars or open calendars that belong to other users in OWA Light, or use any of the views that are anything other than a daily view. So the Calendar is probably the one part of OWA Light where you'll notice that there are many options that are unavailable to you that you might have expected from OWA. And you're not allowed to create rules that will run on the server in OWA Light, only rules that will run in OWA Light itself.

So a lot of features gone missing, but the trade-off is a fast, visually easy to use interface in OWA Light and you will choose between those two on a case-by-case basis. But I'm going to assume for the rest of this course that we're going to spend the majority of our time in OWA.