Outlook, O365, Mandatory Profiles

[synaesthesia]

Trying to get our head around this setup and not having a huge amount of luck!

If we can get away with not redirecting appdata, I'll be very happy, that's a lot of crap I'd rather not have to store.

 

Anyway, the issue is thus.

 

O365, new setup. Would like to install Outlook on the stations (currently have Office 2010 without Outlook.). IMAP connections to server. Pushing it out via SCCM to including outlook with a PRF with the server details included, so it automatically picks up %username%@domain.net

 

That side seems to work alright. It asks for a password on opening Outlook, which is fine; small sacrifice for a mandatory profile and no different to SIMS. However once opening it's whining about data files. This is clearly because they're trying to write to the appdata folder, and even if it could, it'd be gone on logoff. Can't find a way to tell Outlook to store it's crap anywhere else such as the user's home drive, at least not in the PRF. In an ideal world I wouldn't even want anything saved client (or even server side) - can't see why it couldn't be like any mobile device where the connection to the server is all that's there with no cached/offline data files. But that doesn't appear possible.

 

Is this something anyone's managed succesfully? I would appreciate any input.

Edited June 20, 2014 by synaesthesia

[Jasbo]

You can use non cached mode for outlook 2010 with 365. We do it for some users who are on terminal servers as don't want anything eating the disk space on machines.

 

We don't use prf, just auto discover in DNS and a suffix In ad matching the email address. On first logon a user would need to enter password, but not after that, but we use a central profile location for terminal server profiles. so don't know how you would get on with your profile setup.

[Asgard]

Id be interested in this.

We currently use mandatory profiles (with non redirected app data), and want to make Office365 available to our students via Microsoft Outlook 2010.

 

Our staff are using an on premises Exchange box again with Mandatory profiles and a PRF file.

[synaesthesia]

Can't see how to disabled cached mode - that requires setting up an exchange account which doesn't appear to be supported with O365 - and if it is, I wonder if that's the best way forward; we would need the emails in Outlook to be identical to what they see at home/on a phone via imap. Spending more time on this today, I'm not redirecting Appdata because that removes so much of the joys of a mandatory profile.

[Michael]

Ideally as you say, if you re-directed the PST file to a directory within their home drive, such as H:\Outlook, in theory that should do the trick. This may be possible if you download/install ORK tools for your version of Office.

 

Another argument is that OWA has come along a long way and there's more and more 'stuff' you can do, just like the FAT client version.

 

From the top of my head, one feature OWA doesn't support is Mail Merge last I checked, whereas MS Outlook obviously does.

[synaesthesia]

Indeed. that's where we are gravitating towards now. If only it was half as good as Zimbra

[Boredguy]

Can't see how to disabled cached mode - that requires setting up an exchange account which doesn't appear to be supported with O365 - and if it is, I wonder if that's the best way forward; we would need the emails in Outlook to be identical to what they see at home/on a phone via imap. Spending more time on this today, I'm not redirecting Appdata because that removes so much of the joys of a mandatory profile.

 

Why are you using IMAP to connect Outlook to Office 365? The Exchange connection should be fine for you and give users the same mail via Outlook, OWA or phone app. Then you can use the cacheless mode onsite, or even redirect the OST file a central location if you don't mind your users only having 1 copy of Outlook open on the network at once

[fairm010]

@synaesthesia Did you get anywhere with this? I'd like to get this going here.

[fairm010]

I have done this, I needed the internal autodiscover DNS CNAME. I need to add our domains UPN now.

[synaesthesia]

No, couldn't get it to behave. Going fully OWA instead. Could revisit it in future though.

[fairm010]

We were finding that OWA was verrrrrrry slow, suspicions are because the proxy is Man in the Middle'ing all the OWA SSL connections so it takes a while. I have got outlook 2010 to prompt for credentials then loads up instantly.

 

Matt

[synaesthesia]

Ok - what's the internal autodiscover DNS CNAME part about? Might be something to consider if it works well enough; we also have an internet system that whilst isn't proxied, SSL is MITM'd and does cause a hell of a lot of problems.

[fairm010]

So we have a zone created on our internal DNS of schoolname.co.uk with several things records set up (HAP+ etc). It is a CNAME of autodiscover pointing to the FQDN of autodiscover.outlook.com.

[synaesthesia]

Ah, cheers. I could find information relating to having cname records set up by DNS providers (i.e. the ISP) but that didn't seem to marry up with that and similar other advice all mentioning internal DNS servers. I'll have a poke around with that, many thanks.

[fairm010]

Do let me know how you get on. At the moment it prompts for their details for their username its prompting them in the format username.school.local. Their email addresses are username.school.co.uk. I have set up a UPN suffix but no dice. Would be cool to have it autofill that bit. The password prompt is ok.

[synaesthesia]

Do you have the ProxyAddresses field complete in AD? should be SMTP:[email protected]

[fairm010]

No, how would I edit that field? I guess there is no option in the AD GUI?

[synaesthesia]

There is, you need to turn on advanced view. I'm not sure this is definitely what you need as we're still starting out ourselves, but MS have advised us on this route:

 

In AD:

 

View > ADvanced Features

 

Going into users then gives you a load more tabs - go to Attribute Editor and you'll find proxyaddresses in there. It's case sensitive, SMTP must be uppercase.