Today’s Post is brought to you by Andrew Atkins, IT Support Specialist
As part of the new Office for iPad suite, Microsoft has released an app called OWA for iPad. OWA stands for Outlook Web App (previously, Outlook Web Access).
This app allows you to access, create and view email, manage your calendar, and keep up with your contacts. You will need to have at least an iPad 2 or iPhone running iOS verion 6 or higher.
Now at this point you are probably thinking to yourself “But wait, I already have these features built into my iOS device. Why do I need another application to handle these things?”
Well for starters the built-in mail, contacts and calendar applications in iOS are all completely separate. With the OWA for iPad they are all neatly packaged into one application. Additionally you can share your calendar with a colleague right from the application or open a shared calendar. Both of these are things you cannot do in the native iOS calendar!
When you first install the OWA for iPad you’ll be asked to sign into your Office 365 account.
Log In Screen for iPad is on the left, iPhone is on the right
Now that you are logged in you will be dropped right into your mail. From here you can create, delete and manage your email just as you would from a normal OWA window or from your desktop Outlook 2013 program.
Now if you want to switch to check something on your calendar or to schedule a meeting simply click on the button in the bottom left of the screen. (Shown circled in Red here)
This button will bring you to the Navigation Screen. From here you can change between Mail, Calendar, People and Options menu. Also if you press and hold this button you can use voice commands to control the application.
The OWA for iPad also includes push notifications on your lock screen so that you don’t miss those important meetings, and new emails, attaching files from your OneDrive, configuring automatic replies for your account along with a host of other features.
Ready to get started? Here’s the link to download and install OWA for iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/owa-for-ipad/id659524331?mt=8
I will be posting how you can manipulate settings for the app in a future post.
Please let us know if you have any questions or if we can be of any help getting you set up on your OWA for iPad.
