Skinning Exchange 2003 OWA

People love to customize their environments, as evidenced by the popularity of family pictures and knickknacks in work areas, not to mention rearview-mirror air fresheners in cars and various kinds of lawn statuary. Software developers have responded to this desire in several ways, one of the most popular of which is giving users ways to change the appearance of their programs, colloquially referred to as skinning. Consumer applications have supported skinning for a while, and Windows has long let you customize the colors and fonts of its various UI elements.

However, one capability has been missing from the Microsoft Exchange Server world: You can't easily skin Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA). Customizing OWA's appearance might seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but a surprising number of Microsoft customers have requested a way to make OWA conform to the appearance of their other corporate Web sites. Companies that offer hosted Exchange services, such as telecommunications providers and ISPs, have been especially noisy about asking for a way to brand OWA with their own logos and color schemes instead of using the ones Microsoft provides.

Microsoft's Exchange team has acted on these requests. Exchange Server 2003 lets you create and apply custom themes that control several aspects of OWA's appearance. When you create a new theme, it becomes available to users through OWA's Options button. You can also specify a particular theme as the default theme for new users.

Simple Customization
Generally speaking, the best approach to OWA customization is to start simply. You can take several simple steps to make OWA look better.

Let's start with the most basic of all customizations. OWA uses hundreds of icons in its Web presentation—the \program files\exchsrvr\exchweb\img directory contains 522 image files. All these files are .gif files, and you can edit them to your heart's content. You can also substitute your own images, although the results might appear less attractive than the carefully drawn images that ship with OWA. Be aware that if you change image sizes, your OWA screens will look strange because the UI elements won't properly align with one another. More problematic is that installing service packs (or reinstalling Exchange) will remove your changes, so be sure you keep copies of your changes so that you can reapply them when necessary.

Two files that you might want to change are logo2.gif and logo-ie5.gif. Logo2.gif contains the logo that appears in the upper-left corner of the OWA screen, immediately above the folder list, and is probably the first customization that most sites will want to make. Logo-ie5.gif is the logo that appears instead of logo2.gif for some earlier (aka downlevel or reach) browsers. Because these logos are simple .gif files, you can use any graphics editor—even Windows' venerable Paint tool—to edit them.

The \program files\exchsrvr\exchweb\img directory contains some files whose names start with "logon" (e.g., logon_microsoft.gif, logon_logo.gif). These files contain the Microsoft and OWA logo, respectively, that appear when you load the forms-based authentication logon page, logon.asp. (For details about enabling forms-based authentication on Windows Server 2003, see "The OWA Evolution," http://www.winnetmag.com, InstantDoc ID 39572.) Editing or replacing these graphics is the simplest way to change the logon page's appearance.

To remove the OWA and Microsoft logos on the logon page, simply open the appropriate logon page, search for the <IMG SRC> tag that contains the name of the file you want to replace, and replace that filename with the name of the file you want to use instead. If you take this route, however, be sure to adjust the <HEIGHT> and <WIDTH> tags on the images so that the browser can lay them out properly. You can customize the appearance of logon.asp more extensively by editing it with Microsoft FrontPage or an HTML editor. This approach lets you much more easily preserve the correct appearance.

One caveat is that Microsoft won't support your changes. If you break something, Microsoft will just tell you to put the original version of the file back in place.

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