Office 2007 Service Pack 2: The Gift That Keeps Giving!
Office 2007 Service Pack 2 hasn’t been out a week yet and already little bugs are starting to rear their ugly heads… one of which you might not notice for months if you don’t regularly configure new Outlook clients to connect to your Exchange environment via Outlook Anywhere (formerly RPC over HTTPS). Oh, and the really fun part is the fix isn’t something you do to the client… its something you do to the server. Pretty sweet. Let’s take a look.
The problem shows up as a pretty generic sounding “The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.” error when you fire up Outlook for the first time. After some lengthy digging I found Microsoft’s KB969519 article which
describes the issue I’m having, but relates it to a Pre-SP2 performance update in KB961752… this particular performance enhancement patch, as it turns out, is also rolled up into SP2 so the fix is actually the same.
The KB article describes 4 different methods for dealing with the issue; method 2 was the one I chose to implement, but needs a little clarification in my opinion. So far, 5 of the 7 servers I’ve done this to did not have the No RFR Service key mentioned present in the registry (all were Server 2008 servers running Exchange 2007 SP1), and the 2 remaining servers did not have the key exactly worded as mentioned. These two had a key Do Not Refer HTTP to DSProxy with a value of 1 as mentioned in the article and as part of the fix should be reconfigured to 0. For all 7 servers I then manually created the Refer TCPIP to DsProxy key with a value of 1. From here I was a little disappointed as the article mentions you should only have to restart the Exchange System Attendant and its dependent services, however in all 7 cases I found that the server actually needed to be rebooted and the Outlook client restarted before it would actually connect as intended. Another exception I’ve found through testing with the KB article is that this particular behavior does not appear to affect Exchange 2003 servers as the article leads one to believe; not that I’m disappointed or anything.
Now, why Microsoft couldn’t have just built in the DsProxy changes into Exchange 2007 from the very beginning… or at least implemented them through SP1 for Exchange 2007 saving administrators this headache is beyond me; but none the less, I hope this helps.
– Dan Thompson
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http://techblogogy.net/index.php/200…-keeps-giving/ http://support.microsoft.com/default…b;en-us;969519 I’ve tried method 4 but haven’t had any [...]
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We have the same issue, upgraded last night to Service Pack 2, then problems appeared with access to one of our Exchange 2003 servers across VPN.
Tried modifying the hosts file but the problem still remains, we get the same error.
We can ping the server by name and by IP address and it replies, and we can even go into the share for the server.
I am stuck!
We have this issue as well. Making the method #2 changes had no effect and off-LAN clients still can’t create profiles at all. Method #4 also doesn’t work but it gets me a little further along. Running ‘netstat -a’ while Outlook tries to connect shows the computer attempting to make a connection to port 135 (“epmap”) on the mailbox backend server. Of course that will never work because we’re not stupid enough to open port 135 on our mailbox server to the world. You’d think they would test the effects of a Service Pack before vomiting it onto the public. Guess not.
So I went digging again for answers from Microsoft and turned up this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968858 . It’s a post SP2 hotfix that addresses the problem and it seems to work. I tested a fresh XP SP3 / Office 2007 SP2 laptop this morning before the hotfix and it failed to configure a profile over OA. After this patch I was able to configure Outlook with only the SSL (Outlook Anywhere) connection. Huzzah!
Good find Tom! I’m getting ready to leave for vacation, but as soon as I get back I’ll have to give it a run in the dev environment and see what I can come up with as far as implementation tips for large / disperse deployments. Sounds like that’s going to get it though. Thanks for the update.
Other’s who are having issues with the steps outlined above, or would like to manage this at the client level instead of the server level; check out the link mentioned by Tom above. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968858
Tried above hot fix on Vista + Outlook 207. but still failed to connect.
Did anyone else found fix for it? This issue happened just after I installed SP2 for Outlook 2007.
I can’t print from Outlook 2007 SP2 clients using Outlook Anywhere. I get this error message: “The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action”
I was able to work-around the initial connection problem by creating the Outlook profile while connected to the Exchange server’s local network. (Outlook Anywhere appears to work fine once the profile has been created). I forwarded your article to my Exchange administrator, but I don’t expect to hear from him for at least a day or two.