Despite all the attention given to free email services provided by the likes of Yahoo!, Google, and Windows Live, Messageware President and CEO Mark Rotman sees significant potential in catering to the needs of enterprise IT managers that need to squeeze the most out of another web-based email service: Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access (OWA).
In a recent telephone interview, Rotman told me that OWA is becoming an even more important tool for IT Pros trying to cater to the needs of an increasingly mobile and tech-savvy workforce. "OWA is the most widely-used business web app in the world, with more than 140 million Exchange mailboxes," Rotman said. "It's not overly well-promoted, but OWA is a much more cost effective solution for enterprises than relying on PDAs and VPN access for email needs."
Messageware recently announced that it had released Exchange 2010-compatible beta versions of several of its more popular OWA product extensions, including Messageware OWA Print 2010, which provides improved OWA calendar/contact printing; Messageware AttachView 2010, which adds additional functionality to OWA's WebReady viewing feature; and Messageware ActiveSend 2010, which provides send email functionality via OWA within apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat.
Rotman stresses that OWA security should be a big concern for OWA admins, given that OWA makes local copies of documents opened with the WebReady viewing feature that makes it relatively easy for a tech-savvy criminal to retrieve documents from a machine that an OWA user has recently accessed.
"[Our OWA products] help users make the right security decisions," says Rotman. "Users who access file attachments using OWA often don't know that the files they're viewing have been saved in the temporary internet files folder, which makes it very easy for someone to copy those files out to another location to access or copy them. This type of exposure is something that many users are unaware of, and we're helping provide that level of protection."
Messageware AttachView 2010 also helps users see much more information about the files they open, including documents that provide revisions functionality, like Microsoft Word. Rotman says AttachView can provide users with even more information about the files they could be sending, which can add another layer of protection against sending embarrassing emails (at best) or communications that could potentially divulge company secrets or expose the firm to legal action.
Messageware does have a public beta program for the upcoming 2010 versions of their OWA enhancement products, which can be accessed at http://www.messageware.com/Beta2010/.
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