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Recent versions of MS Exchange finally support the full version of Outlook Web App ("OWA") for non-MS browsers and operating systems. You can now use, e.g., Chrome on Windows or Firefox on Linux.

Now as a Linux+Chrome user, I was surprised to find that OWA still only worked in "lite" mode for me. Turns out, OWA bases this decision on your user agent string; if you happen to be running Chrome on Linux, you get dumped to the non-AJAX UI.

This seemed arbitrary to me, so I decided to try switching the user agent to that of the Windows version of Chrome - and bam, it just worked.

I'd like to find a chrome extension to handle user agent switching well, but I haven't seen one yet. For now, I just run chrome as the following:

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.481.0 Safari/534.4"

Optionally, you can append a flag to use Chrome's spiffy "app" mode as well (or just create an "app shortcut" in chrome and add the user-agent string):

 --app="https://mail.mydomain.com/owa/"

UPDATE!

In the time since I originally wrote this post, Chrome has implemented per-tab UA overrides. Yay! And subsequently there are now good UA switcher extensions.

I now use User-Agent Switcher for Chrome for this purpose. This plugin is especially nice since you may add a domain in its "Permanent Spoof List" settings page, and it will automatically spoof for that domain and that domain only. In my case I add the domain:

mail.mydomain.com

And the UA:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.1

After doing that I never have to think about it again.

Comments

Alan @ Thu Apr 07 09:18:43 -0400 2011

Interesting, I have the same problem but even when running Chrome in Windows 7. Your trick worked a treat though - thanks for that!

Stephen @ Sat Jun 23 10:41:28 -0400 2012

If you want your Google Chrome launcher to include an option to run in app mode with the appropriate user agent, you can do the following:

--------
cp /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop ~/local/share/applications
chown : ~/local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop
--------

(where is your username and is your group)

--------
sudo gedit ~/local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop
--------

Inside gedit, find the following line:

--------
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewWindow;NewIncognito
--------

append to that line the following:

--------
;CheckOutlookMail
--------

So that it looks like:

--------
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewWindow;NewIncognito;CheckOutlookMail
--------

Then, append the following lines to the end of the file:

--------
[WindowsMode Shortcut Group]
Name=Windows Mode
Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.481.0 Safari/534.4" --app="https://mail.mydomain.com/owa/"
TargetEnvironment=Unity
--------

Stephen @ Sat Jun 23 11:20:18 -0400 2012

It appears that app mode may not work with exchange 10. I adjusted it to just pass the URL, and it worked fine. No app mode, but that's ok.

--------
[WindowsMode Shortcut Group]
Name=Windows Mode
Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.481.0 Safari/534.4" https://mail.mydomain.com/owa/
TargetEnvironment=Unity
--------

Stephen @ Sat Jun 23 11:21:47 -0400 2012

oops...typo in both:

--------
[CheckOutlookMail Shortcut Group]
Name=Windows Mode
Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.481.0 Safari/534.4" https://mail.mydomain.com/owa/
TargetEnvironment=Unity
--------

The option you put in the X-Ayatana line needs to match the option you put in the brackets.

Sorry!

TheEarthDragon @ Mon Aug 27 21:00:00 -0400 2012

Thanks for this tip. OWA worked perfect in Debian Squeeze (6.0.5). THANKS!

py @ Mon Oct 22 04:59:22 -0400 2012

I use this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg
and it works like a charm !

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