Microsoft to Retire OWA Light Client In Exchange Server (bleepingcomputer.com)
- Reference: 0184390498
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/07/10/0838224/microsoft-to-retire-owa-light-client-in-exchange-server
- Source link: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-announces-owa-light-retirement-in-exchange-server/
> "OWA Light was an important compatibility experience when the web needed it. Today, the full Outlook on the web experience is the right place for us to focus," the Exchange Team [2]said on Wednesday. "Retiring OWA Light will help reduce legacy surface area, simplify ongoing engineering work, and allow us to continue improving the experience customers use every day."
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> Microsoft introduced OWA Light [3]roughly two decades ago as an alternative to OWA Premium, offering a simplified web interface for systems that didn't have Internet Explorer 6 or later installed or ran older web browsers. At the time, the company said that OWA Light offered a cleaner look, faster logon times on low-bandwidth Internet connections, and worked in locked-down browser modes (such as kiosks).
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> Microsoft deprecated OWA Light as of August 19, 2024, and announced this week that the OWA Light experience will likely be removed from Exchange Server (on-premises) next month. "In an upcoming Exchange Server update (estimated in August 2026), we plan to disable and remove the OWA Light experience. After that change is introduced, users will no longer be able to choose or be redirected to OWA Light and should use the modern Outlook on the web experience instead."
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-announces-owa-light-retirement-in-exchange-server/
[2] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/upcoming-retirement-of-owa-light-in-exchange-server/4534943
[3] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/microsoft-outlook-web-access-light-2007/603682
I forgot it existed (Score:3)
Guess that would make it a good thing to retire.
Microsoft might be right about this one (Score:3)
As much as I want to say, it might be useful to have Web Based E-mail interface that will work in a basic / legacy browser, I don't know this is really true.
Not much of the web works at all if you try to use it with anything not Chromium or Apple-Webkit from less than five years ago. YMMV with recent Mozilla engines.
The few places where I can see someone maybe wanting to use this are the very places that people definitely should be isolating from all things Internet, especially not exposing it to e-mail content, which even if restricted to being from the local domain could still contain something malicious accidentally forwarded.
I can certainly understand why people would want / maybe just like or prefer a range of other legacy mail client. I mean if you handle a lot of mail and have been using Pegasus or something for the last 30 years and its all muscle memory, sure I get it. Moving from OWA-lite to OWA though probably isnt much bother for most people. At some point it makes sense to drop software likely very few folks are using.
Re: (Score:2)
As you say that, I can't help but notice that this is a Microsoft story that didn't immediately spur a hundred knee-jerk, "M$ sux, use Linux" posts.
And here I thought that there was nothing MS could do that wouldn't create outrage. I guess deprecating something intended for IE4-5 compatibility is it.
Re: (Score:2)
> YMMV with recent Mozilla engines.
Aside from the occasional browser level bugs do you actually have an example of anything that doesn't work with a Mozilla engine? Even a 5 year old one? For all my complaints about Firefox (which are multitude) I keep hearing about parts of the internet that only work in Chromium based browsers, but I'm still keen to actually see a real example of this.
Firefox has it's problems, but I've yet to come across a single website that doesn't work on it or renders incorrectly on it. Can you share some? Or can we p
The Web Experience? (Score:2)
Is that the web experience where 1/3 of the screen is advertisements, a pop-up asking you to subscribe every minute, or another persistent pop-up offering to give you assistance? Or maybe a complete takeover by a bad advertisement redirecting you to a phishing site? Or is it the one where each day a feature has disappeared?
Re: (Score:2)
There are no ads; this is about Exchange server, not Hotmail.
Re: (Score:2)
How can I get 2/3 of my screen back? Asking for a frie..
Retool AI-generated apps that make it to production
Anyone Here? (Score:2)
Is anyone here still running Exchange on-premise? I'm not bashing. Rather I'm genuinely curious what the current install base might be.
If you are still running Exchange on-premise, are you pure Exchange or an Exchange/M365 hybrid setup?
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. My company is still doing on-prem to 365 migrations on a regular basis and I'm aware of three companies that I've interacted with that are still on-prem including one that's staying on-prem only for the next few years at least. Personally getting rid of on-prem exchange (well mailboxes, until recently you needed to keep it for AD user mail attribute management) and sharepoint admin is one of the big upsides to going to 365.
Outlook is crap. Attitude is to Blame (Score:2)
I use Outlook on the web at a large university. Emails come in and DON'T SHOW. If I know they are there, I can search for them. This isn;t new; everything Microsoft does is shit. It doesn't work. To be fair, they obviously put more work in the native platform. But my experience with Microsoft, whether from a 200 page thesis in word that crashed every 5 minutes because there were equations and diagrams in it, to Word currently not formatting the same on Mac, Windows and Office 365, subtly corrupting papers w
Re: (Score:2)
Then there's Excel, which I'm stuck using because work just loves their spreadsheets.
Where opening a 90mb file with some semi-complex calculations takes several minutes to recalculate after even the most basic change, drastically slowing down the machine. Where checking the "Processes" tab in Task Manager to see if there's a hung task eating all the resources and seeing Excel using 90% of the CPU and ELEVEN GIGS !!!!??? It's a 90mb file, it's the only one open, why the hell are you using 11gb??!!!
Frakking
Re: (Score:2)
My take is everyone who likes to talk about experience needs to be fired, and the software industry will be in a much better place.
Re:Experience (Score:4, Insightful)
They're called "the marketing department".
I suspect a great many things could be improved by their absence.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only marketing. A pox on UX.
Re:Experience (Score:4, Interesting)
I think what happened is that over a decade ago, some market researchers found that millenials preferred "experiences" over physical items (probably because they make for better selfies). Marketing departments, being staffed with geniuses and definitely not people who are "like sheep, but drunk", ran with it and haven't let go.
Re: (Score:2)
So it should be "marketing experience", then. It has that sort ephemeral quality one knows as "marketing".
Re: (Score:2)
As in "millennials preferred marketing experiences"? That would work with my assumption that they just wanted to do things they could post photos of. Self-marketing.