As its name suggests, OWA for iPhone is not a full-fledged Outlook client in that it’s limited to the single e-mail account associated with an Office 365 account. It does, however, have most of the functionality you’d expect from a phone mail client. It syncs contacts with the iPhone address book, pushes notifications for appointments and new mail, and generally does everything else that the Windows Phone 8 Outlook and Calendar apps do with a somewhat similar interface.
Microsoft has thrown in a few things to subvert the Apple ecosystem besides building the application in an HTML5 clone of its “Metro” interface. For example, when you set the location for a meeting in OWA’s calendar, you can search for the location with Bing Maps and attach the address and map information to the appointment. Other features of the Outlook and full Outlook Web clients, such as automatic creation of appointments based on the contents of e-mails and access to LinkedIn data on the sender of an e-mail, are also part of the OWA for iPhone client.
The OWA client adds an additional layer of security for people who put the app on their personal phone—a mobile PIN. You can add a four-digit PIN code to the app to protect access to your e-mail, allowing you to pass your phone to your bored child or spouse to play Plants vs. Zombies without worrying about exposing them to the horrors of your work life.
The startup screen for OWA for iPhone.
The startup screen for OWA for iPhone.
You must be at least this tall to ride: OWA for iPhone only works with the most up-to-date version of Office 365. If you're still on the pre-Office 2013 edition, you're stuck.
One per customer: OWA for iPhone does not support multiple Outlook accounts. But that's not really a big deal, since OWA is meant to keep your Outlook mail from mingling with the unwashed masses of your personal mail accounts.
There's a brief walk-through with tips on the interface after you first launch the app.
OWA allows you (or requires you, based on security settings) to set up a 4-digit security PIN separate from your iPhone's password.
Once you're logged into the app, it looks a lot like Windows 8—with a flat tile interface and HTML5 animations.
The Inbox looks almost identical to the Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 "Metro" mail clients.
In messages, OWA can use the same Exchange server-side applications as Outlook 2013, including the built-in LinkedIn tool for pulling up contact data and the "Suggested Meetings" feature.
Tap "Suggested Meetings" and OWA starts building a calendar entry based on the text of the e-mail.
You can then edit the location or search Bing for a matching location to get the actual address.
Pick the location that matches...
...and it's added to the appointment, ready to be added to your calendar and sent to other invitees.
You can set the time for an appointment quickly with Microsoft's answer to the spinning-dial interface—a set of scrolling blocks to set the hour and minute and choose between AM or PM.
There are three calendar views to choose from—an agenda view...
..and a month calendar view, which drills down into daily or agenda view when you tap on days with appointments.
While the editing interface for messages is spartan—perhaps too spartan—tapping on the ellipses at the top-right of the screen pulls down some additional options for messages.
The People interface—OWA's address book—is essentially the same as the Outlook Web interface from the browser.
This is where you can select to embed content from your phone in the message, as well as set and check address fields and importance.
Unfortunately, there's no connection here to SkyDrive or local storage other than photos, so all you can send from the iPhone is images.
Close a message without sending, and you can save as a draft or delete.
Listing image by Sean Gallagher
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