Deny download & allow view of attachments with OWA 2016

Question

Hi

We have created a new mailbox policy and disabled the following property (Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -name NewPolicy DirectFileAccessOnPublicComputersEnabled $false) to deny download & allow only view the attachments with OWA 2016 (Exchange 2016 On-Premise). But once we apply the policy to end user, he could not view the attachments (we tried to view Word / excel / pdf files with different browsers). As a security recommendation we have to implement this policy. How can we fix the issue and allow view permission & deny download?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

With on-prem, you would really need to use OOS to make this happen effectively:
https://bhargavs.com/index.php/2015/11/18/configuring-rich-attachment-preview-in-exchange-2016/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/Exchange/plan-and-deploy/install-office-online-server?redirectedfrom=MSDN&view=exchserver-2019

With this architecture. you can allow viewing as a rich document and prevent downloading of office docs etc...

Answer 2

@LMS
Hi,

Agree with Andy,you need to install an Office Online Server to enable previewing attachments in OWA.

By default, the following file types are displayed using Office Online Server:
Word documents (doc, docx, dotx, dot, dotm extensions)
Excel documents (xls, xlsx, xlsm, xlm, xlsb extensions)
PowerPoint documents (ppt, pptx, pps, ppsx, potx, pot, pptm, potm, ppsm extensions)

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Answer 3

Thank You Andy & Kael

OOS is already in place and used by OneDrive. So we will use / configure the same URL with Exchange.

As of now we have 2 X Exchange servers in same Datacenter. Later we may have other servers in DR or may have some hybrid configuration. So we will apply the settings at server level, what do you think?

Thank You.