OWA Tray Monitor
 
Search this site

An Outlook Web Access New Mail Notification Tool


This is a free tool aimed squarely at corporate Exchange Users who use Outlook Web Access (OWA) as their primary user interface, as opposed to Outlook itself. The benefits of OWA, especially when off-site, are many and I'm not proposing to go into them here. Suffice to say, this tool is for those already happily using OWA.


Twitter



Follow updates and announcements for OWAtray on Twitter.



Why?

Well, as powerful and useful as OWA is, it does have a few drawbacks which make it slightly less intuitive to use over standard Outlook. Most of these can be worked around by applying some clever tricks however the single most annoying feature lacking in OWA is it's ability to inform the user that new mail has arrived when working on another application.

OWA will flag new mail when you are actually working with it, however as Internet Explorer doesn't allow notifications to be executed outwith the security cordon of the browser, this feature is unfortunately lacking.

Features

  • Works with Exchange 2007 & 2010
  • No need for Outlook to be installed
  • Clean install and remove
  • No dependencies other than .NET
  • Choice of notification methods
  • Growl & Snarl Integration with zero configuration
  • iPhone integration via Prowl
  • Configurable update frequency
  • Tiny footprint
  • Free!

How it Works

OWAtray uses a relatively new interface exposed by Exchange Web Services (EWS) which comes standard as part of Exchange 2007 (SP1) so if you are running Exchange at an older version than this then I'm afraid OWAtray is not much use to you. Sorry.

Additionally OWAtray depends on an HTTPS route being configured and tested into your corporate LAN. This is exactly the same setup as Outlook Anywhere and ActiveSync use so if those facilities are up & running in your organisation then OWAtray should work seamlessly. If not, please get your System Admin to do the necessary. Lastly a properly installed x509 certificate, issued & certified by a known authority should be configured on your web server.

Development

I developed OWAtray because I wanted this functionality for myself and couldn't find a simple free utility that plugged the gap.

At the moment, OWAtray is free and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. If you are of the nature where you feel you would like to contribute to the ongoing development of the software then you can kindly Donate.

The version available here was written in a little less than a day so is extremely young & immature. I fully expect it to be buggy and I reserve the right to upload new versions as and when I fix issues or add new functionality. Refer to the Blog for the Changelog.

Warranty

This is a free program, you may download it and use it without any implied warranty whatsoever. 

OWA notify

Envador over at http://www.owanotify.com/ has a more feature-rich application which does pretty much exactly the same job as this except it didn't work for me. Exchange 2007 seems not to be supported at this time.