CUSTOMIZING EXCHANGE 2007 OWA INTERFACE
Hello all
In this article, i will talk about the basic steps for customization of Exchange 2007 OWA interface. OWA (as you already know) is an Exchange service for users to reach their e-mails via a web-browser without need for Outlook client. The server that gives this service is the one which is holding Client Access Server (CAS) role.
So, why we change the interface? Actually it doesn’t give much to us but it can be great to have a customized interface rather than the default one. Moreover, your boss may also like it :). In short, today’s subject is not a big deal and fun part of the Exchange administration.
First of all i have to mention that OWA interface uses Theme. Theme is a collection of fonts, icons, background colors and headers. There are two main factors that build Theme: Pictures and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files. The location for these files is \ClientAccess\OWA\<version>\themes folder under the installation folder of Exchange 2007. There are few folders in this level and Base folder is one of them. It includes the files which are used by the default OWA theme. The other folders include the files for extra Themes that OWA offers. I have to mention one more thing here. If you install Service Pack for Exchange Server 2007 on your CAS server, your customized theme will be ineffective, because the version of Exchange Server is changed by the update. Therefore, the OWA interface turns to its default. You have to make the same changes to your theme again after Service Pack installation under the new version folder.
In this article, i will make all the changes under Base folder. Becuase of that, i have to backup this folder beforehand. After backing up, i modify all the files listed below according to my needs by an image editor program without changing the sizes. Here are the files:
Lgnbotl.gif Lgnbotm.gif Lgnbotr.gif Lgnexlogo.gif Lgnleft.gif Lgnright.gif Lgntopl.gif Lgntopm.gif Lgntopr.gif Logon.css Logopb.gif Logopt.gif Nbbkg.gif
So, where these files are used? The figures are showing this below:
Figure 1: Logon screen
Figure 2: Logoff screen
The red surrounded parts of the figures are the image files that are used in theme. The field in the middle is the text field. The color of this field is modified by editing logon.css file. For this reason, we open the logon.css file by notepad and search for the word, background. We change the color code #7f90b1 (that is written after background) with the value #2d3d69. The second code is found by the help of an image editing software ( i use GIMP 2.6.4) and it is the color that i use in other image files. Therefore, i make the colors of surrounding image files and middle text field, the same.
The color tone that i use is consistent with the default theme colors. Therefore, i do not change the colors of text and dividing lines. If to change the colors of these is necessary, we have to modify two things in logon.css file. For changing text color, we search for select, table{color:#ffffff;} and replace #ffffff with the color code of our choice. For changing dividing lines between texts, we replace #A9AAC4 with the color code that we want.
There is a heading part that we see in OWA while we use our mailboxes. The first figure below is representing the default heading while the second one is the modified one:
Figure 3: Default header part
Figure 4: Customized header part
This is it for now. I briefly try to explain the basic steps of OWA interface customization. By following the article, you can customize your OWA web interface in a short time. If you want a detailed explanation about the topic, I recommend you the Microsoft article “Customizing the look of Outlook Web Access” ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310750(EXCHG.80).aspx ). Bye for now.
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