(C) British Crown Copyright 2019 Met Office.

Author: Steve Wardle

OWA Checker

OWA Checker is a tool to provide native popup notifications for mail and calendar events for users using Microsoft's OWA (Outlook Web Access) - the online version of Outlook

Prerequisites (Required)

• Python (2.7 currently, 3+ support pending investigation)
• gtk (for interfacing with GNOME)
• gobject (for interfacing with GNOME)

Prerequisites (Optional)

• wmctrl (Command-line utility for switching workspaces)
• xset (Command-line utility used for blinking scroll lock LED)

Microsoft Azure Setup

Before you can use OWA Checker you need to create a new application profile for it within Microsoft's Azure system. The steps here may vary depending on your site but will be something like:

1. Navigate to portal.azure.com and sign in using your account (which should redirect to your own site's infrastructure)
2. The app name doesn't matter, call it something like "OWA Checker"
3. Under Authentication use "Web" and Redirect URI of "http://localhost:1234"
4. In the Overview, make a note of the "Application (client) ID"
5. Under Certificates, make a note of the "Client Secret" (create one if needed)
6. Under API Permissions, ensure that the app has the following:
   • Calendars.Read
   • Mail.Read
   • User.Read
   • User.ReadBasic.All
   • offline_access
   • openid

NOTE - if any of the above will not work, it is likely that you will need to ask your local platforms team for help here - some of the settings need and Admin level account to apply them. In my case I added such a user as an additional "Owner" of the app and had them apply these changes

Checker Setup

With the above done you will need to create a wrapper script to launch the checker which provides it with the app information. The form of the wrapper script should be something like this:

#!/bin/bash

# Authentication and site-specific settings (from Azure)
export OWA_CHECKER_CLIENT_ID=
export OWA_CHECKER_CLIENT_SECRET=
export OWA_CHECKER_DOMAIN=

exec /installation/path/to/owa/checker/app/owa_checker "$@"

Populate the environment variables accordingly with the Application ID and secret. For the domain this is your local site's email domain (i.e. the part of your email addresses following the @ sign)

Running the Checker

The first time you run the checker you should provide the extra argument:

owa_checker --auth

This should prompt you to navigate in a browser to http://localhost:1234 and doing so should prompt you to login with your credentials. Once this step is done you can re-launch the checker without the argument to begin using it (note that you can then continue to launch it this way and should not need to authenticate again unless there is a problem)