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Archive for Outlook

Long Live Exchange Public Folders!

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 05 2016

Back in 1996, Microsoft introduced Public Folders as a replacement for social aliases, and was “designed from the ground up to enhance group collaboration applications” (per this Lane Severson blog post)

By the time that Exchange 2003 was released (13 years ago!), however,  the rumors that public folders would be discontinued in a future release of Exchange were swirling around. Take for instance this WindowsIT Pro post from 2004:

The handwriting has been on the wall for public folders for a year or two. I first heard a Microsoft speaker strongly discourage use of public folders at the MEC 2002 conference. An administrator who attended the same session was in a state of near panic because her university has thousands of public folders in active use.

In a TechRepublic 2010 post it was declared that public folders would probably be gone by Exchange 2013:

Since before the release of Exchange 2007, Microsoft has been telling us that public folders will eventually be discontinued. This hasn’t happened just yet though. Public folders are alive and well in Exchange 2010. Even so, public folders probably won’t be supported in the next version of Exchange.

So here we are in 2016, and guess what? Not only are public folders still around, Microsoft has decided that “public folders are great” per this Microsoft Technet FAQ:

No. Public folders are great for Outlook integration, simple sharing scenarios, and for allowing large audiences to access the same data.

And on February 1, 2016, Microsoft announced they will be increasing the number of public folder mailboxes in Exchange 2016 from 100 to 1,000!

Happy 20th birthday to Public Folders!

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Categories : Exchange, Microsoft, Outlook, SBS
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KB3114409 May Affect Outlook 2010 Settings

by KW · Comments (0)
Dec 08 2015

There are some reports that an Outlook 2010 update that was released today (KB3114409 Dec 8, 2015) may impact operations of Outlook 2010. You may find that it will only run in safe modem, or your Outlook settings may get reset to default, or configuration changes you make will not stick.

If so, uninstall KB3114409 for now. Read more here

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Categories : Office, Outlook, Windows, Windows 10
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Outlook Crashing after Latest Updates–KB3097877

by KW · Comments (0)
Nov 11 2015

I am seeing many reports today of Outlook crashing after the recent set of Office 2010 updates, as well as getting a blank screen after pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL for the login screen.

It appears that KB 3097877 may be the cause. If so you can try uninstalling that KB patch.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3097877

There is also a suggestion to clear the Java cache. Instructions can be found here:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/plugin_cache.xml

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Categories : News, Office, Outlook, Tools
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Tool to Analyze Message Headers

by KW · Comments (0)
Sep 16 2014

Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a great resource tool for testing and running diagnostics against Exchange, ActiveSync, OWA, POP3/IMAP, Lync, and Office 365. It also includes Message Analyzer, which is an SMTP header analysis tool and makes reading email headers less painful.

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Microsoft’s Exchange Team has a good blog post on how to use the Message Analyzer feature.

For grins and giggles, I sent myself and email from my Gmail account to my business email account, and then processed the message header through the Message Analyzer.

  1. Open up the Message Analyzer tab of Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer in a browser window.
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  2. Open up your email client and access/view the message header. Select and copy the complete contents of the message header.
    I have a separate post that explains how to view email message headers from Outlook 2010/2013.
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  3. Flip back to your browser, and paste the message header into the Message Header Analyzer area.
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  4. Click Analyze Header and you will get a Summary report, plus a list of Received Headers and other headers.
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Categories : Email, Exchange, Outlook, Windows
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View Message Headers in Outlook 2010 and 2013

by KW · Comments (0)
Sep 16 2014

I’m often asking customers to send me the message headers of an email when diagnosing an email issue. With Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013, the ability to quickly display the message headers is no longer there, by default. But, we can quickly add it to Outlook’s Quick Access Toolbar. Once we are done, viewing message headers in the future will be a “one click” process.

So, let’s get to work!

  1. Open up Outlook, and look at the top left where you will find one or more icons.
    Click on the drop down arrow to open up the Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu
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  2. Click to select More Commands
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  3. Click the dropdown arrow in the Choose Commands From area, and then select All Commands
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  4. Now scroll through the list of commands, select Message Options, then click Add
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  5. Click OK to finish. You will now see a new icon for added to the Quick Access Toolbar.
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To view message headers, select a message and then click on the Message Options button from the toolbar!

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Categories : Essentials, Outlook, Tools
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Windows Update Advisory

by KW · Comments (0)
Aug 18 2014

Last week Microsoft rolled out a large set of updates that cover both the Windows operating system and Microsoft Outlook. In my testing, the updates have installed fine. However, Microsoft has indicated that they have since removed some of the Windows OS updates from distribution on Friday – based on early feedback from users that they may cause a “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) situation.

The most sever case is with MS14-045. For details on the updates in question, check out this ZDNet article.

For I.T. personnel, Ed Langley (Naked PowerShell) has written a  series of PowerShell scripts (click here) to determine if any of the relevant updates are installed on a system.

  1. If you, tend to periodically run Windows Updates on your own workstations, I would advise against doing so until I hear more from Microsoft.
  2. The Microsoft Office updates are not involved, and can be applied as desired.
  3. Finally, it’s because of situations like these that I recommend that servers are NOT configured to have updates automatically applied.

There is nothing you need to do as a response to this email. This is simply an advisory – unless of course you have encountered a workstation that has had a BSOD.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms14-045.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2982791

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Categories : Microsoft, News, Outlook, Servers, Tools, Windows
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How to fix WinMail.dat attachment issues with Exchange

by KW · Comments (0)
Jun 30 2014

From time to time I will encounter an Exchange Server where the customer reports that attachments to emails they send out are being received as WinMail.dat files by some recipients. This hold true whether it’s an image file, a PDF file, etc.

The cause is quite simple: The Exchange server has an option to define whether or not to send attachments in “rich-text format”. If this option is enabled, this will cause attachments to be converted by some email clients into a WinMail.dat file. This is due to a methodology called “Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format” (TNEF) for sending messages across the Internet.

The solution is also quite simple: we just need to set the option on Exchange to “never use”. No rebooting of Exchange or the server is required after making this change.

Here are the detail steps (based on Exchange 2010):

  • Open up Exchange Management Console (EMC)
  • Drill down Organization Configuration –> Hub Transport
  • Click (to select) the Remote Domains tab
  • Right-click on Default, then click Properties
  • Click  (to select) the Message Format tab.
  • Under Exchange rich-text format section, click (to select) Never use
  • Click Apply and OK

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Categories : Exchange, Outlook, SBS
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Microsoft fixes OWA Premium issue when using IE11

by KW · Comments (0)
Jun 26 2014

My fellow MVP’er, Oliver Sommer, posted on his blog site yesterday (6-25-2014) that Microsoft quietly resolved an outstanding issue (KB 2866064) with Internet Explorer 11 and Outlook Web Access (OWA), where it would only display the “lite” version of OWA instead of the full “premium” version.

The fix is included in the following rollups:

Exchange 2007 Service Pack 3 Rollup 13

Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 3

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 3

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Categories : Exchange, Outlook, SBS
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Moving multiple folders in Outlook 2013

by KW · Comments (0)
May 06 2014

I was doing a recent migration of email from Windows Live Mail (WLM) to Outlook 2013. The built in transfer within WLM worked perfectly in moving folders over to Outlook with one exception. This customer has two mail accounts created in Outlook, and the folders being transferred over from WLM needed to go into the second (non-default) email account.

No problem, I thought. I’ll transfer them over to Outlook, and then drag and drop the folders from the default mail account to the second mail account.

But Outlook does not support selecting and moving multiple folders, and this customer had several dozen mail folders to be moved. I wanted to see if there was a workaround or a fix for moving multiple folders within Outlook, and I found Pandali Folder Master for Outlook utility.

I ran this on the customer’s Windows 8.1 laptop, and quickly moved the folders to the proper account.

In summary, I was very surprised that the WLM to Outlook transfer worked without a hitch, and that this utility program took care of getting multiple folbers moved to the right email account.

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Categories : Email, Office 2013, Outlook, Tools
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Outlook 2010 displays Autodiscover Security Certificate Alert window at startup

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 06 2014

I had a customer with an SBS 2008 server who called this past week to say that they were getting the following popup alert when starting up Outlook 2010:

The name on the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site

SNAGHTML17ae3bd2

I ran the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer to test Autodiscover for this customer. And sure enough, it was failing the test to validate the server name.

Certificate name validation failed. Host name xxx.com doesn’t match any name found on the server certificate.

The first article I reviewed was KB 940726. Although the title of this KB article indicates that it was written for Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007, it is also applicable to Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010. It covers how to change the internal URL for the Autodiscover service stored inside Exchange via Exchange PowerShell commands.

However, in my case, the PowerShell command get-ClientAccessServer | fl was showing that the AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri field was showing the correct URL.

SNAGHTML17bae007

In talking with other MVPs, it appears that the issue may have to do with someone making changes to the domain name “A” or “cName”. I am still tracking that down.

But meanwhile, I was looking for a quick solution to at least suppress those popup alerts on a short-term basis, as I was going to be traveling for the next several days.

More research lead me to this blog post from Tipst3r titled: “Turn off Autodiscover for Outlook”, which was a recommendation for adding a registry key called “Exclude ScpLookup”. I gave it a try, but it did not appear to work. Also, I wanted more information as to what this registry key did, and why.

So, on further searching, I found Microsoft’s KB 2212902 titled: “Unexpected Autodiscover behavior when you have registry settings under the \Autodiscover key”. This article listed seven different optional registry settings that one might create and use.

I started working with these options, and found that using the following three options (setting them to a value of “1”) would disable the “security certificate is invalid or does not match” popup window from appearing:

  • ExcludeScpLookup
  • ExcludeHttpsAutoDiscoverDomain
  • ExcludeSrvRecord

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I’m not one to generally implement a workaround. So part of this was just a desire to understand more what was going on “under the covers”, so to speak. I will be testing out making the recommended changes to the domain records later, but since I will be gone for a week, I did not want to make such changes at this time.

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Categories : Exchange, Outlook, SBS
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