Adding OWA as a web application to Horizon Workspace

[adamRbarber]

We have setup horizon workspace and have most of it configured.

The one thing we would like to do is add Outlook Web Access as a web application but finding it difficult to find information on what we need to do to achieve this.

Would anyone have any tips or suggestions on how we can accomplish this?

We think that the right direction is to setup ADFS (ActiveDirectoryFederationService) and a second site on the exchange server following a guide like this (All things Microsoft: OWA SP2 and ADFS) and then in horizon workspace add a new application and the Auto-discovery (meta-data) URL should be the xml file on the second site of the exchange server..

[vedeht]

Exchange doesn't support SAML authentication which would be required to do this.  Sorry.

[adamRbarber]

So even with Exchange with SP2?? because according to this post it may be possible.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchange2010/thread/1d404e79-ba93-47a8-b40c-6180fed...

Any one else have any ideas? it would be such a handy feature to have in horizon.

[Seb1180]

Been looking into the same and would really enjoy having OWA into it. In fact I got it requested by most of our pilot users.

If anyone come up with something it would be great if he could share it.

Cheers

[Seb1180]

Just to bring this post up a bit. As anyone succeeded implementing OWA as an application ?

[howj123]

I tried a few different methods, but this is definitely not trivial. I brought it up to the workspace PM's at vmworld this year, and they said that both OWA and SharePoint are highly requested apps to be supported, and they they hear us loud and clear.

Take it with a grain of sand, but I think we'll see support in the next few versions of HWS.

[bchris999]

Just wanted to revive this thread and add a "me too"!

We are currently deploying Horizon 6, and as part of this I am looking at Workspace (as it's included). The only apps users have access to are VDI (word, excel, outlook, line of business apps etc are here) and OWA. If I could get users to sign on to Workspace (using SMSPasscode externally for 2 factor) and have a single portal for VDI and OWA, it would be awesome. Without OWA, I don't see the value Workspace would add to the deployment.

[howj123]

As far as use cases are concerned, we rely on Workspace as a SAML identity provider for SSO to Webapps (Salesforce, ADP, AirWatch SCL, Socialcast, etc) and use it to stream Microsoft Remote Apps to endpoints running the horizon client. Doing this has allowed us to give our users more flexibility and not force them to use a full VM.

I'm still interested in the ability to use Workspace as an IDP for OWA. It still looks like the only way to achieve this is to set up ADFS and make a bunch of changes to exchange. I'm leery to go down that road, mainly cause I'm not an Exchange admin and don't want to be .  If you're interested, people have had some success using the method outlined here: The Identity Guy - Articles - Access OWA with ADFS

For what it's worth, I met with the product team for the Workspace portal at VMworld and mentioned both MFA other than SecurID (Read: Radius) as well as SSO with Microsoft products other than Office365. Hopefully we'll see some of these changes coming in the next few versions.