Exchange 2010 blocks Linux from using Premium OWA.
by Carl Farrington on Apr.19, 2009, under News & Reviews, Tips & Tricks
I have just installed the beta of Exchange 2010.
It seems that when accessing OWA through Firefox or Epiphany on Linux, we’re only given the option of OWA Light, therefore exactly the same experience as with Exchange 2007.
Firefox on Win32 works as expected. How obviously intentionally lame.
Fortunately we can override the useragent in both Firefox and Epiphany (my preferred browser due to FF’s annoying right-click Linux bug).
Go to about:config in the address bar, click on the “I’ll be careful” thing to carry on, and right-click, create a new String, called general.useragent.override with the following as the data:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8
Close and reopen Epiphany or Firefox and Exchange 2010’s OWA Premium works perfectly 
Note: you must close all Epiphany or Firefox windows for this to take effect.
Even better is that you can use Prism to launch OWA “as an application”. You will need to edit /usr/share/prism/default/preferences/webrunner-prefs.js and add the following line:
pref(“general.useragent.override”, “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8″);
See screenshot below:
OWA Premium from Exchange 2010 launched through Prism on Ubuntu Jaunty
April 19th, 2009 on 6:33 pm
Oh, one problem.. right-click in Epiphany gives the brower’s context menu, rather that the OWA ajax-y menu. Hmmm.
April 30th, 2009 on 11:56 pm
Hey Carl. Re Prism, brilliant idea, I’ve been looking for something to host OWA full on Linux. Unfortunately, I installed Prism and added your suggested line, but to no avail – Light remains. I’m not sure which Exchange version we used, but does this little trick work only for v10?
Thanks.
-Chris
May 1st, 2009 on 8:18 am
Hi Chris, I’m afraid it’s not much of a trick and does indeed only work for Exchange 2010.
Exchange 2010 is supposed to support Premium-OWA on major non-IE browsers, but it looks like Firefox on Win32 is supported but not Firefox on Linux. Changing the user agent in this way merely makes Firefox/Linux appear as Firefox/Win32.
I already tried using IE’s user agent string in Firefox on Exchange 2007, and that does gives a messed up screen – the code really is IE specific.
October 20th, 2009 on 4:08 pm
Rather than change the User Agent string globally within Firefox, I suggest using a Firefox plugin, such as User Agent Switcher:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
Cheers,
Nick
November 16th, 2009 on 4:59 pm
Seems that Exchange 2010 OWA doesn’t work with Nokia E90, E63 and Xpressmusic 5730. Just gives the error “Script alert: undefined”.
February 5th, 2010 on 11:00 am
Just a big thank you from me for this information – UCL is rolling out Live mail for staff and students and we needed to know how to support OWA on Firefox in other operating systems, this has been a big help for us!