We are migrating from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2010. We are currently using Outlook 2002 for our mail clients but I was planning to move up to Outlook 2010 clients. As I was doing my research I discovered that the new OWA client for Exchange 2010 is vastly different than what we were using previously and appears to be fairly feature rich. I am wondering if some smaller companies like us (35 users) just use that instead of Outlook?? We don't really need much of the functionality available in Outlook 2010 at all. Basically we need to manage email including archives, access other mailboxes, manage calendar, contact and task lists and access Exchange Public folders. Is all of this available in OWA? I know that in the 2000 version, you could not access exchange public folders...

Yes all of those features that you mention are available in OWA (even public folders). Whether or not to use it as your everyday client is a good question. I have seen some companies do this. It reduces costs, help desk issues, etc. Supposedly there is about 90% of the Outlook features in OWA. Don't ask me what the featues are that aren't included. You mentioned archives, OWA can only access Exchange Online Archives, not PSTs. Exchange 2010 SP1 will make even more improvements on OWA. But people love the regular Outlook client. BTW, there is not a migration path directly from Exch 2000 to 2010. You will have to either migrate to 2003 or 2007 before you go to 2010.Tim Harrington - Catapult Systems - http://HowDoUC.blogspot.com

You can do that but its inevitable that someone will find the one feature they need that only Outlook supports. I have to admit, I prefer Outlook over OWA.