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Category: Outlook

Quick Tip: Outlook Crashing?

Many of our customers have been experiencing some of their users having Outlook crashing immediately after opening. We even had other tech companies call to find out how we were fixing it, so we investigated and found the following known issue from Microsoft:

Users experiencing Outlook connection issues and crashes
EX218604, Exchange Online, Last updated: July 15, 2020 10:12 AM
Start time: July 15, 2020 9:18 AM
User impact:
Users may experience crashes or may be unable to access Exchange Online via Outlook.
Current status:
Our initial review of the available data indicates that recently deployed updates are the likely source of the problem. We’re performing an analysis of all recent service updates to isolate the underlying cause of the problem and to determine the most expedient means to restore service.

We will be keeping our monthly clients up to date on this issue. 

Is Email Down Again?

Email Down

While troubleshooting an email encryption issue after a WHM / cPanel web server migration, my thoughts turned to email down time and what it is worth to a small business. This is the core concept behind business continuity – “Business continuity encompasses planning and preparation to ensure that an organization can continue to operate in case of serious incidents or disasters and is able to recover to an operational state within a reasonably short period.” (Wikipedia) The best way to recover from a disaster is to have planned in advance for the eventuality and have systems in place that provide redundancy when the incident occurs. When it comes to business email continuity only one name comes to mind:

Microsoft Office 365

Guaranteed Uptime – Microsoft provides a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that financially backs their services based on a guaranteed amount of uptime per month. If service is down for more than 45 minutes (99.9% uptime) in a month then a 25% credit will be given, if service is down for more than 7 hours (99% uptime) in a month then a 50% credit will be given, and if for some reason they are down for more than 36 hours (95% uptime) in a month then a 100% credit will be given. Considering the literal billions of users of their products, having to give away credits for downtime would seriously cost Microsoft so it is in their favor to keep the services flowing.

Geographic Redundancy – Microsoft has Office 365 data copied to servers in no less than 8 datacenters around the United States including one nearby in Washington. This means that a hardware failure or lost data in one center will not effect the other 7 datacenters – email will continue to be routed through the others until services can be restored to the one. With redundancy like that there should be no worries about downtime or data loss.

Unparalleled Support – Office 365 email is running on Microsoft Exchange being administered and supported by the people who created it. There is nothing like going to the creator of something to talk to them when there is a problem. They have the breadth of experience that comes from using their own products for the past 20 years. This level of knowledge is unparalleled in the industry and it shows in the quality of service and support that is received. 

If your company needs the best in class reliability and service that comes from switching to Office 365, then contact us for assistance.

Issues After Office 365 Migration

Keep running into this issue at client sites where an on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server (especially from Microsoft SBS Server) to Office 365 migration has taken place. Client workstations are unable to connect to Office 365 servers via Autodiscover for their migrated email accounts. During Outlook first run it would pre-populate their email correctly but then try to connect to the old email server instead. If the DNS settings for the workstation were changed to non-domain external DNS servers then the email would not pre-populate but the setup would complete successfully. Checked the Autodiscover URL using NSLOOKUP to the Microsoft servers from local domain DNS servers successfully, so felt a little stumpled. Research pointed to the Service Connection Point (SCP) object in Active Directory which can be either deleted from the server or excluded on a per workstation basis, so both will be shown here. Starting with the server first:

Deleting SCP from Server after Office 365 Migration

  • Login to a server with Active Directory Domain Services installed as administrator
  • Launch ADSIedit from the Start Menu
  • Right click on the root of the console and choose “Connect to…”
  • Under “Select a well know Naming Context” choose Configuration
  • Navigate down through the tree as follows (these are always listed from the bottom up on other tech sites for some reason):

    CN=Autodiscover,CN=Protocols,CN=,CN=Servers,CN=Exchange Administrative Group,CN=Administrative Groups,CN=First Organization,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services

  • Delete the entire CN=Autodiscover object if you no longer have any on-premise Exchange Servers
  • Reboot the workstation to clear the DNS / AD cache and try to connect to Office 365 servers again

Deleting SCP from Workstation after Office 365 Migration

  • Lauch Regedit from the Start Menu
  • Navigate to the following key based on your version (16.0 for Office 2016):

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\x.0\Outlook\AutoDiscover

  • Add a 32-bit DWORD called ExcludeScpLookup with the value of 1 to enable
  • Next navigate to the following key based on your version (16.0 for Office 2016):

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\x.0\Outlook\AutoDiscover

  • Add a 32-bit DWORD called ExcludeScpLookup with the value of 1 to enable
  • Reboot the workstation to effect the Registry changes and try to connect to Office 365 servers again

If your organization needs any help with troubleshooting issues with Office 365 or with migrating from on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server, then don’t hesitate to contact us for support.

Office 365 Meeting Rooms

Shared calendars for the use of shared meeting space reservation is becoming a thing of the past. Office 365 has a better type of calendar specifically made for rooms. This guide will show you how to set up these Office 365 Meeting Rooms in Microsoft’s Office 365 admin portal. Login to the Office 365 Portal with an administrator account and do the following:

Setup Office 365 Meeting Rooms

  1. Click on the Meeting Rooms tab on the left of the Office 365 admin center.
  2. Click on the + symbol to begin the creation of the meeting room object.
  3. Fill in the needed information (Name, Email Address and Room Capacity) then click Create.
  4. Now users can access these meeting rooms when creating a new Meeting in Outlook by clicking on the Rooms button and selecting them.
  5. Once selected that room for that date at that time will be marked off on the associated calendar. There are also color coated indicators as to the availability of the meeting rooms on the selected date in the calendar.

The meeting room will also now appear in their Calendar tab of Outlook and can be used similarly to other calendars. If you have any issues setting things up for your site, please feel free to contact our Office 365 experts to guide you through the process.

Deploy Office 365 Desktop Apps

Recently had to deploy Office 365 Desktop Apps on a terminal server which did not work with the standard download from the web portal due to licensing issues. Only customers with Office 365 E3 licenses or greater are able to use the deployable version of the Office 365 Desktop Apps in a terminal server environment. Here are the steps needed to deploy the apps:

Deploy Office 365 Desktop Apps on Terminal Server

  • Download the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run here.
  • Run and extract the tool to a folder on your Terminal Server.

    Office Deployment Tool

  1. Edit and configure the configuration XML file as follows including the \\[SERVER]\[SHARE]\ path:

    <Configuration>
    <Add SourcePath=”\\[SERVER]\[SHARE]\” OfficeClientEdition=”32″>
    <Product ID=”O365ProPlusRetail”>
    <Language ID=”en-us” />
    </Product>
    </Add>
    <Display Level=”None” AcceptEULA=”True” />
    <Property Name=”SharedComputerLicensing” Value=”1″ />
    </Configuration>

  2. Please visit this TechNet article for more details on the configuration file settings, like excluding apps from deployment.
  3. From an elevated Command Prompt, navigate to the folder extracted files are located in, and run the following to download the installation files:

    Setup.exe /download configuration.xml

    The Office365 ProPlus installation files will be downloaded to the specified share with the following structure.

    Office365 ProPlus installation files

  4. From an elevated Command Prompt, run following to install Office Click-to-Run:

    Setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

    When the installation is complete, the Office 2016 suite will be available for use.

  5. On starting the application, you will be prompted to Activate Office. Click Next and Sign in.

    Activate Office 365

  6. Once signed in, you are ready to go. Office will automatically activate and configure the applications. This is supposed to work similarly with deployment via Group Policy. If your company is using a terminal server for your remote access and need help to deploy Office 365 Desktop Apps, then contact us for assistance.

Share Users Office 365 Calendar

The old way to accomplish Exchange calendar sharing between users was to either connect to each individual users workstation to right click and share the calendar to users in the Global Access List (GAL) or to install their profile on your system and do the same. There have been some wonderful advances since the advent of Powershell that allow Office 365 calendar sharing permissions to be set remotely as follows:

How to share Office 365 Calendar via Powershell

1. Make sure the Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell is installed properly

2. Open Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell as administrator

3. Type in the following to run signed scripts for Exchange Online:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

4. Type in the following to enter the administrative credentials for Office 365:

$creds = Get-Credential

5. Enter the Office 365 Administrator credentials then click "OK" button. 6. Type in the following to connect to Office 365 via PowerShell:

Import-Module MsOnline

Connect-MsolService -Credential $creds

7. Type in the following to connect to Exchange Online via Powershell:

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $creds -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session

8. Type in the following command to change the calendar permissions:

Add-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity sharinguser@domain.com:\calendar -User recipient@domain.com -AccessRights Editor

Once this command has been executed for each individual recipient that will access the sharing users calendar, then you can have them right click to add the shared calendar in their Outlook. For a list of possible Access Rights see this great page by the University of Wisconsin. If your company is using Office 365 Calendar and needs help sharing them, then contact us for assistance.

Clients Receive WinMail.dat File

Had a customer reporting that their clients receive WinMail.dat file as an attachment instead of the email that they intended. According to Microsoft Support:

The Winmail.dat file is used to preserve Rich Text formatting. Outlook uses it when sending a Rich Text-formatted message. During transport, the content of the message may be changed, preventing the receiving client from being able to read the formatting instructions. In other cases, the receiving client does not use or recognize the winmail.dat file.

Two ways to stop clients receive WinMail.dat file as attachment

Either send everyone plain text emails or change the settings on a per contact basis inside of Outlook. Here is a link for how to do it on a per contact basis, this can be tricky but worth it if you want to keep the rich text formatting of email for the rest of your contacts.
If your company is using Exchange or Office 365 for email and need help troubleshooting, then contact us for assistance.

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