UC Unleashed

Recently, someone on a distribution list asked for a method for users to ‘agree’ to a disclaimer before being able to logon to OWA. One of the suggestions was to just append extra info to the logon page, the way that Microsoft Corporate does. Click the images below for a screenshot of Microsoft’s OWA Exchange 2007 and 2010 logon pages.

As you can see below the fields for user credentials, Microsoft has added some helpful text and links. Thanks to Ross Smith IV, I’ve gone through the way Microsoft does it, cleaned up a little, and now I’m gonna show you how easy it is.

The method Microsoft employs is to just use an ASP include to include the contents of a text file. That text file can contain any HTML code you’d like to apped to the logon screen. For the sake of example, I’m going to use the same text that Microsoft uses. Let’s get started.

1. On your Client Access Server, create a text file called disclaimer.inc in the \Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\Owa\Auth folder of your Exchange installation, and insert any additional code/text you want to include on your logon screen.
2. Backup \Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\Owa\Auth\logon.aspx for safekeeping
3. Open \Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\Owa\Auth\logon.aspx in notepad
4. Find <table>
   right under that, insert a line with the following:
   <!– #include file=”disclaimer.inc” –>
5. Save and close the file
6. Visit the OWA logon page, and marvel at your handywork.

There is no need to restart services, reset IIS, or anything. In fact, as soon as you make changes, you can just refresh the logon screen to see the results.

The contents of the cleaned up disclaimer.inc that yields the above results looks like this:

<div style='font-size: 8pt;'>To protect against unauthorized access, your OWA session will automatically time out after a period of inactivity. <b>If your session ends, refresh your browser and log on again.</b>
<hr />
<b>For best OWA performance, click the link that corresponds to your Exchange server:</b>
<br /><br />
<a href="/">Europe </a>
<strong><a href="/">Redmond </a></strong>
<a href="/">Sao Paulo </a>
<a href="/">Singapore </a>
<a href="/">Exchange Dogfood </a>
<a href="/">Windeploy </a>
<a href="/">WinSE </a>
<hr />
<b>Having Trouble Logging On?</b> Please contact the <a href="/">Microsoft IT Global Helpdesk</a>
<hr />
Want to find more information on OWA? Need full access to Microsoft's corporate network or alternative ways to access e-mail from Outlook or a Windows Mobile device?<br />
<a href="/">The Remote Connectivity Options extranet site gets you started.</a></div>

A couple of notes:

The Microsoft version, if you view the source of their OWA page, isn’t quite as clean as this example. I spent some time cleaning things up and removing any unecessary code so that it’s not only more compliant, but easier for the non-HTML coder to understand.

This method is completely unsupported by Microsoft. Don’t go crying to them when it doesn’t work, or blows out your OWA logon page. You made a backup of logon.aspx for a reason.

This change may get overwritten by any hotfix, rollup, and/or service pack that overwrites the logon.aspx page. So you may need to reapply the change to the logon.aspx file after updating.