Finally, a use for Internet Explorer!

So, to cut a long story short, due to my employers’ “interesting” IT policies, I’ve ended up providing my own computer, which can only be connected to the guest wi-fi, not the real network. However, I would still like to access my work e-mail, which is kept in MS Exchange.

Enter “Outlook Web Access”. Now normally this isn’t a great deal of fun to use: the interface is clunky, and it doesn’t even refresh itself to show new messages as they arrive. But this is because you are limited to the “Light” version when viewing it with any browser other than IE.

Load the full version in Internet Explorer, and by some Microsoft magic, it is almost identical to the standalone version of Outlook inside a web browser container! You can even right click things and they do what you expect.

So, that makes two neat pieces of engineering from Microsoft that made my day. The other one was Windows 7.