Some of you may ask, what is OMA? Back in the day, Exchange 2003, mobile devices were starting to make their way into the corporate world. Outlook Mobile Access (OMA) was introduced to help provide a small, thin foot print to mobile devices. You have to also remember that back in 2003, cellular networks were not what they are today. Thus there needed to be a way to provide the needed e-mail communication to mobile devices and minimize bandwidth impact. OMA was one of the answers.
By the time Exchange 2007 was developed, the Exchange Product Group (PG) wanted to provide a rich, web like interface for phones. So OMA was dropped. It wasn’t until Exchange 2010 SP2 that the PG brought back ‘OWA Mini’, which is Outlook Web Access but a ‘Mini’ or thin version to reduce requirements for high bandwidth.
Enter Exchange 2013 and once again the PG used resources to further enhance the mobile experience. For additional information on the new OWA design, the Exchange Team Blog site posted this article:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/08/02/the-new-owa-rocks-tablets-and-phones.aspx
To see the different screen views, add the extra information after your default OWA logon:
Logon to OWA and change the URL to https://owa.company.com/owa?layout=tnarrowto see the phone view experience when you use OWA, which displays one column width.
Logon to OWA and change the URL to https://owa.company.com/owa?layout=twide to see the tablet experience, which has two columns of data to present.
And the https://owa.company.com/owa?layout=tmouse version is the full, three column view that looks similar to the Outlook client view.
Browser Syntax | View | Columns |
/owa?layout=tnarrow | Phone view | 1 |
/owa?layout=twide | Tablet view | 2 |
/owa?layout=tmouse | Standard view | 3 |
I hope that helps explain how the previous OMA option has evolved to where the product is today.
Mike