Honestly, email is the biggest load of garbage I've ever had the displeasure of knowing. Yet, we rely on it, every single day, on our smartphones and computers, to communicated with colleagues and coworkers, bosses and subordinates.
There is a better way, but that's completely irrelevant, since the entire market is so ingrained in this concept of email that it's no longer worthy of any discussion. So put away your high hopes of a wave-like interface for communication. Email is horrible, and it's not going anywhere. With email being so prevelant, it's impossible to keep up. Users get bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of new messages every day, many are never deleted, instead left to waste in the enterprise server's inbox, unopened, unread, unloved, and irrelevant.
Aside from the growing problems of users inboxes being too bloated with unread messages, you have costs on costs on costs.
What's nice is that Microsoft has made it pretty easy, buy Windows Server, buy Exchange, voila, a nice, simple, easy solution. works, add your users, give them mailboxes, and set quotas based on how many people you have, and how much disk space there is on the server. done.
Cost: 1xServer, 1xOS, 1xExchange.
If you want to add mobile access, tick a box to enable Activesync, voila, now iPhone, Android and (last but not least) Windows Phone (formerly Windows Mobile) can now obtain any and all Exchange content. What's more, they can enjoy instant delivery with push notifications. Users can access their Exchange calendar, contacts, email and more, all sync'd with the server, and to their enterprise outlook. ... Wonderful!
Cost: whatever you want to spend on a mobile phone.
Now let's add... let's say, 5 blackberry users. We want full integration of the system, so BES is the way to go. and let's say, just for kicks, that the server we previously purchased is powerful enough to run BES along side Exchange, etc. So no new hardware here, besides the phones. Well, That's great, the Blackberry users have full exchange sync and can access their stuff.
Cost: BES (not cheap, look it up) plus a licence for every blackberry device, and, obviously, the phones.
.... okayyy, what the...
so it's going to cost me how much to just get blackberries working? okay, what if we go hosted?
Well, no server cost, no cost for base exchange or BES, so that's good right?
I have to pay an amount for every email account, but that's okay, I suppose, and for every email account I have access to it from iPhone, Android and Windows Phone, as expected.... but what about blackberry, I have to pay DOUBLE for BES ACCESS? are you joking?
just to have a blackberry?
I'm sorry, but I will continue to rage hard about this, Blackberry isn't special, their system isn't significantly better than Android, or Windows Phone. this is unjust, and the market is realizing that.
I've never really been on the "RIM is dying!" train, but I think I'll have to jump, because with this, as an IT professional, I would never suggest for any organization to buy into this. avoid it at all costs. Unless a company REQUIRES blackberry for some SPECIFIC reason, that no other platform and fulfill, there is no reason to buy it, or use it.
So, After my previous fix, the OWA pictures started not-loading again.
I moved the contents of the most recent folder under the program files/microsoft/exchange/client access/owa directory to a safe place, for safe keeping, and issued a command to create a junction, with the same name as the directory that I just moved, linking it to the previous version.
to do this, I used the command line command: mklink /J
or something of the sort.
This effectively copied/pasted the contents of the previous version into the "current version"s directory.
OWA works again.
Of course, I checked to make sure the application settings were correct in IIS Manager first...
good luck to all those who many be experiencing this problem
After a recent update, automatically applied to my server as of the last time it was active; likely incomplete, my OWA's pictures stoppped working.
I finally resolved the problem.
You can go through and debug every little error, if you'd like, and I recommend it, a smooth OWA is a happy OWA, but what I found the problem was, was pictures that were missing.
The confusing part about OWA and Exchange's web presence (Client Access), is that it's all so intricate that it's hard to decode. Take a look at your %programfiles% folder, under Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\Owa\
You'll see some base files and a series of folders, mine all started with 8.1.###.#
I have about five different versions of the OWA server installed. at least, that's what I'm gathering from the different version numbered folders. I would presume that the ASPX files in the root, dynamically load the newest OWA revision in the folder.
An easy and quick fix would be to revert back to an old OWA, just delete the newest (highest numbered) folder, and voila, it should work... My problem was that I was missing the pictures from owa and owa lite.
I since havn't gotten OWA premium working, but I suspect it might be a problem with my IE on this system, I have to do more investigating before I figure it out. Regardless, to fix a problem like the pictures, go into the 2nd newest folder (where I presume you had OWA access with everything working as expected) copy the themes folder, and paste it into your newest owa folder, combining it with the existing contents. There were css's in my existing folder, which I chose to keep, but I would assume that the damage would be negligible if one were to decide to "overwrite all" in this scenario.
if you've done this, or confirmed the folders have gif's and jpg's or whatever, in them, then you're dealing with a permissions issue. be sure to give the IIS user account (IUSR_ for IIS6 and IUSR for IIS7) read access to the theme folder, recursive. that should fix the problem of no pictures working, and should at least get OWA lite working.
getting a straight forward answer with all this has been difficult, but when I noticed the subfolders under themes, in the newest version of the owa directories, only contained one css file, and the older version numbers had many more files of varying types (mostly css, gif, etc), I decided to give it a go; and it worked!
Now, if I could only find that guide I had that explained how to use self-signed server certificates for Exchange ActiveSync...
I know it has to be done from the command line, since the GUI doesn't have the necessary options to create a self-signed cert for a dns entry that it does not technically inhabit. To explain, my server is located behind a NAT firewall, with port forwarding for port 443 (SSL). The servers address, according to the server is WIN-*random characters*.domain, where, to the rest of the internet (and any web-accessing Windows Mobile device) will see it as simply the domain name (no computer name). So, the server needs to issue a self-signed cert, that the public key is exportable to the device (for manual addition, RE: Trust), for the root domain.
I'll do the work for it later, when I have time, for now, OWA works, despite the certificate errors.
