How To: Connect to your W drive from Student OWA

A new feature that came with our upgrade to Exchange 2007 is OWA's Direct File Access ability.  This will allow a user to read data from their W drive locatation using the premium client of OWA. 

 

NOTE: This access only works with the Internet Explorer browser version 6 and above. Access is READ-ONLY. You will not be able to edit any of the files that reside in the U or W locations. You also cannot add files to the location using this type of access. The read-only access is by design and can not be changed. 

 

I bet most of you are eager to see the OWA direct file access feature in action, so let’s get going by logging on to a mailbox using OWA 2007. Remember you need to use the Premium client in order for the feature to work. Also bear in mind that, unless you changed the default configuration settings, you need to select This is a private computer on the forms-based Authentication (FBA) page shown in Figure 1 below.

 

 

 

Once you are logged in you should see your exchange email folders and some buttons below your folders (or bottom left corner).  Click the Documents

button to setup and view your document locations.

 

 

 

The documents area of OWA will show any document locations that you have added AND made a favorite for.  If you just add a document location and do not create a favorite for it then you won't have the locations when you log back into OWA at a future time.  Below is a documents area with no locations added.

 

 

 

Lets add a U drive location to this area.  Click Open Location at the top left corner to start.  You will then be asked to input a path location for the U drive.  The actual path to a users' U drive is: \\studentsrv\users\<username> .  For example, John Doe may have a username of john_doe32.  His W drive path would be: \\studentsrv\users\john_doe32\

 

Enter your unique W drive location and press Enter or click the Open

button.

  

 You should now see your W drive contents listed in the right pane.

 

 

 

As mentioned before, if you did nothing else and logged out of OWA, you will lose this connection to your W drive.  To keep it every time you log into OWA you must use the Add to Favorites option.  When you click the Add to Favorites 

button you should get a message telling you it was added successfully and you should also see your W drive shortcut/connection added to the documents list on the left.

 

 

Now you have added your W drive to OWA and created a shortcut so it will show up each time you log in. 

 

Now that you have setup connections to your W drive I suppose you would like to know how the files.  First, all documents will be read only.  You will not be able to edit any of your W drive documents through OWA.  That said, lets take a look at opening folders and documents...

 

First lets look at the example of a W drive below:

 

If we right click on a folder we get the following options:

 

As you can see we have four options here, Open which will simply open the folder in the right pane, Open in New Window which (you guessed right) will open the folder in a new browser window. We then have an option called Copy Shortcut, this option will copy the folder UNC to the clipboard. Right-clicking Readme and selecting Copy Shortcut would copy an UNC called file://studentsrv/users/john_doe32/Readme to the clipboard.

If we right click on a file we get the following options:

 

Selecting Open would open the file in the associated application, in this example Microsoft Office Word.   But what if you’re accessing your mailbox from, for example, an Internet kiosk or from home? Well it doesn’t really matter, because then you simply select Open as Web page instead as I did with a word document in below. In the top of the browser window you can see the full name of the respective file as well as how big it is. You also have the option of opening or saving the particular file by either left clicking (will open file in the respective application, if installed locally on the machine from which you logged on to OWA) or right-clicking (saves the file to disk) the file.

Note:
It’s the new OWA 2007 WebReady Document Viewing feature which makes us capable of opening almost any type of file in a browser window, instead of the associated application. As some of you may know the WebReady Document Viewing feature also can be used to open message attachments in ordinary email messages.

The third option in the file context menu is Send By Email, which will attach the selected file as an attachment in a new Email message see below.

 

 

The last option in the context menu which is Copy Shortcut

is similar to the one in the folder context menu. It will provide a UNC to the file.

Note: The direct link to the Student OWA system is: http://stuowa.eku.edu