The OWAAdmin tool

This week’s column was on the very cool OWAAdmin tool. I neglected to mention that Tosh Meston, one of the developers on the OWA team, mentioned it in his blog– sorry, Tosh.

This tool, which you can install on any Microsoft IIS server that runs version 1.1 of the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET, lets you remotely administer your OWA servers from anywhere in the organization. Although OWA offers quite a few features, the process of controlling OWA servers has always been a hassle because it depends on the creation of registry keys or values. Every Windows administrator knows how to do that, I know; the problem arises when you want to make configuration changes to multiple machines. Doing so manually is a bother and is even harder when you factor in common security settings that restrict or prevent remote registry access. You can always create your own Administrative Template file and attach it to a Group Policy Object (GPO), but only if you have the proper permissions in Active Directory (AD). Exchange administrators are often dependent on some other person or group to make directory changes.