Today, the Exchange team announced the immediate availability of the (free) OWA for iPhone and OWA for iPad apps. Exchange fellows Tony Redmond and Dave Stork already hinted earlier this month that something was about to happen in this area.

Users of the Windows 8 Mail app may find the look of the OWA apps to be very familiar:

A quick summary on the app features:

• Stored credentials for automatic logins;
• Push notifications;
• Meeting reminders (even with app closed);
• Voice activated actions (English only);
• Contact sync for caller ID function;
• Remote wipe capability (user data, when the app runs).

That last one is a great, much requested feature when Bring Your Own Device is practiced (apart from that it makes sense due to the sandboxing principle). When required the business can selectively wipe business data without touching your personal information, similar to a feature to be introduced with Windows 8.1 called Remote Business Data Removal.

Besides that you need an iPhone 4S or iPad 2 or higher running iOS 6 or later, the apps are currently only supported for Office 365 subscribers running the tenant on Wave15 (or later). There are reports of the apps working with on-premises Exchange 2013 but that’s unofficial. To find out which version your tenant is running, use Get-OrganizationConfig in a remote PowerShell session, e.g.

$session = New-PSSession –ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell –AllowRedirection –Authentication Basic –Credential (Get-Credential) –ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange
Import-PSSession $session
Get-OrganizationConfig | ft AdminDisplayVersion

My tenant is running on 15.0.698.10 (15 = Wave 15), so theoretically I’m good to be running OWA for iPhone or OWA for iPad. I say theoretically, as I don’t have any iPhone or iPad available for testing.

An app version for on-premises Exchange 2013 is expected to be released at a later date. More information on configuration and usage of the OWA apps on the Office 365 blog here.