New OWA with Exchange services upgrade
Posted on August 12, 2004 11:40 AM
CIS is in the process of upgrading various components of the Campus Exchange infrastructure. While these changes will not require any reconfiguration of your email client, it will mean that if you use OWA you'll notice a significantly different look and many performance and feature enhancements after the upgrade has been completed.
Some of the new features include:
- Spell-check (requires Internet Explorer on Windows)
- Ability to add a signature to your outbound mail
- Junk mail filtering
- Blocking of embedded external HTML content
- Customization of the OWA interface
The upgrade itself occurs in two stages.
- The first stage was an upgrade of the OWA, POP and IMAP servers to the new version of Exchange. As a result, OWA icons are slightly different as isl the logoff page. (This upgrade took place on August 5.)
- Stage two involves upgrading the Exchange servers that host the mailboxes. The full OWA 2003 client will be available after upgrading the mailbox servers.
The mailbox servers for students will be upgraded first on Sunday, August 15, between 4:00 a.m. and noon. The following weekend, the servers for faculty and staff will be worked on between 8:00 a.m. and noon on Saturday, August 21. There will be intermittent email connectivity during the scheduled hours, with each upgrade incurring several short outages, generally only 5 to 10 minutes in length.
Note that all email messages and folders will be retained during the upgrade.
There are some final upgrade steps that may occur the first time you log on to your (upgraded) Exchange mailbox:
- If you use an IMAP client (like Outlook Express or Eudora in IMAP mode), you may notice that your client "hangs" for several minutes during the first logon to your upgraded mailbox. In the background, Exchange is upgrading the IMAP content of your mailbox and this delay will only happen once. Be patient and do not abort this process since you will simply have to wait through it later.
- If you use Outlook in Native/MAPI mode, Outlook Express or Eudora in POP mode, you won't experience any delay and you may not even notice that the upgrade has occurred.
- The OWA client is brand new and if you use OWA as your primary mail client, you will not experience a delay when you connect to your mailbox the first time.
- Messages that have been purged from your Deleted Items folder (this is where messages go when you "Empty Deleted Items") are not upgraded and your Deleted Message Recovery Area will be built from scratch after the upgrade. Please Note: messages in your Deleted Items folder are considered part of your proper mailbox and these messages will be upgraded with the rest of your mailbox folders.