MS Exchange is irritating me II
So today at work, on the Techsupport list there was a long drawn out discussion about Calendars and MS Exchange (largely complaints about cost). Near the end of the thread, the MSCA team’s comparison of the features available to the various clients was included. I haven’t done any confirmation of their findings (largely because I have no access to do so and they are theoretically the local experts), but one of the identified differences with the (non IE) Web Client that jumped out at me as noteworthy:
No weekly or monthly calendar view
WHAT!?!?! How do you have a web-calendar product that can’t produce weekly or monthly views of your calendar? There are hundreds of free web calendaring projects and ALL of them have weekly and monthly views.
The entire Outlook Web Access team should hang their heads in shame for being unable to provide the most basic of features that twelve year olds with no development experience are capable of producing.
Currently, we use Oracle Calendar which is a mediocre product, but it does have Windows, Mac, and Linux clients in addition to a web client — and that web client (which pretty much blows) seems to be vastly superior to OWA. Originally, I didn’t care too much that I was going to be forced to use Exchange for calendaring because Oracle Calendar was not too useful, but facing a massive downgrade in functionality I’m none to happy.
The bigger issue with the OWA calendar is that it doesn’t always synch properly, which means that you can miss appointments or have no one show up for that meeting that you scheduled via OWA.