Ive created this little Greasemonkey script for the MS Exchange OWA (Outlook Web Access) that does 2 things for your firefox experience:
- Keeps your session alive
- Shows you number of unread mails in Inbox
A script already exists1 that does this, however it simply refreshes the entire OWA page, and only as long as youre on the Inbox page. Thus while eg. writing a new mail, youre session isnt kept alive. In my script, it is :).
Visually, it doenst change that much:
number of unread emails in title bar, updates even though im composing a message
updates process bar while minimized
The cool thing is that there isnt any “refreshing” to see. Hence, the page doenst visually refresh. Its all done in the background, inside a hidden “iframe”. Here, the Inbox page is refreshed and re-read every 60 seconds so you dont get disconnected from the OWA and so we can update the “unread mails” counter. The iframe is hidden inside the menu-frame to the left (because that frame never reloads).
Click here to install (greasemonkey firefox plugin required)
1. MsExchangeRefresh by Jehiah Czebotar (which inspired me to make my script)
- Dan
Comments
Lovely - thank you! This web app was driving me nuts. Now if you can find a way to retrieve the URL of a message (so that I can later click on that URL to open the actual mail), it will be perfect!
Hey.. Youre wellcome :).. I dont quite understand your request.. Do you want it to auto-open the mail or what?
Excellent! We use SecurID so timeouts are a HUGE pain in the ass. This is perfect.
Thank you, this is incredibly useful.
The only problem I have experienced is that I cannot attach a file to an email when this script is enabled. I’m using Firefox 3 on Ubuntu / accessing OWA provided by MES 2003.
Thank you very much. It works great.
Ok. I must be doing something wrong. I can’t get this to work and I really, really like the idea. Do I just add my exchange server address or is there something else to it? Thanks.
Andrew:
Yeah that should basically be it. Heres an example of what i use:
https://login.example.com/exchange/*?Cmd=navbar*
How do you use this? When I entered https://login.example.com/exchange/*?Cmd=navbar* as the URL (of course, replacing the login.example.com with my own exchange server location, it shows a 404 page. I don’t understand the bit with the *?Cmd=navbar* bit. Is that supposed to be part of the URL?
Oh! I found a forum where you posted about it. So we’re supposed to edit the javascript. Quoting you, “just edit it the @include part to have your outlook server address, but leave the /*?Cmd=navbar* on the end of it so it’ll work. “
Hi Luke.
I googled the text you’re quoting and no, thats not me. But it is basically my script, with a couple of extra lines added to it.
You dont need to modify the script to change the URL. You click the greasemonkey icon in the lower right corner of your browser, choose “manage user scripts”.
Then select the script in the list.
Select the url in the box called “Included pages” and click edit. Modify this URL to match your OWA.
Also note that this script hasnt been tested with the newest version of Exchange, so milage may vary.
Thanks for taking the time to create this and for making it available. My OWA is set to time out every 3 minutes so this script has basically saved my sanity…. thanks again.
Your screenshot shows OWA 2007. We’re using OWA 2003. I can see the script is working (window title changes to ..loading..) but doesn’t update the unread message count properly. I slightly modified the script (print unread message count in both scenarios) and the unread count was always -4, even after I sent myself a test message. Is it possible that two versions of the script are required, one for OWA 2003 and one for OWA 2007?