Office 365 mail issue

[clareq]

Some of our users are seeing the attached when they open webmail with Internet Explorer. There is no consistency - a user can get the issue on one machine, and not another, but other users on the original machine see no issues. We've cleared profiles and cleared IE cache, but no change. Chrome consistently works.

Any ideas?

[TLARWise]

We have been having exactly the same issues but also haven't found a solution yet.

[ZeroHour]

Open up the developer tools and refresh the page and see if you can see any errors or elements that fail to load.

[Bob_the_Goon]

Have you contacted Microsoft support about this? They are usually pretty good. Perhaps it's a system fault?

[clareq]

We have been having exactly the same issues but also haven't found a solution yet.

 

Where are you? There were some problems with Virgin in Yorkshire recently, and it started after that - were you affected by that outage?

[clareq]

Have you contacted Microsoft support about this? They are usually pretty good. Perhaps it's a system fault?

 

We've spent all morning on the phone to Microsoft - they seem stumped - we were told they don't really have expertise in IE anymore, and why weren't we using Edge! Windows 7 is probably the answer to that question...

[TLARWise]

Where are you? There were some problems with Virgin in Yorkshire recently, and it started after that - were you affected by that outage?

 

We are in Dudley, West Midlands. Our issues started last week. If it was an internet issue though wouldn't it affect all users on all computers and browsers?

 

I tired moving one of the affected computers to my office for testing, logged in as an affected user and everything worked fine. I then took it back to the original room logged in as the exact same user and the issue came back again.

 

I can't check developer tools at the moment as they are currently disabled for users that are having these issues. I will try to get it unblocked and see what happens.

[beany1]

Could this be to do with that those parts of the website are on a different CDN, don't Akamai do that for Microsoft? Maybe check filtering reports, some addresses are blocked others aint?

[clareq]

I can't find anything obvious with Developer tools, but our issues started at the same time as yours. The strange thing is that two users in the same OU, with the same filtering can log onto the same machine and only one have the issue. However, it is consistently that user.

[clareq]

Just checked the real time web filter - nothing being blocked.

[TLARWise]

Just checked the real time web filter - nothing being blocked.

 

I can confirm that nothing is showing as being blocked my end either.

[sbrade47]

I've had the same issue last week, only affects IE, Chrome is fine. Nothing shows in the web filter.

 

The issue for us was the SMARTInk service running in the background. I think it somehow creates an overlay which interferes with how Outlook loads in IE. You can turn off SMARTInk so the toolbar doesn't appear but that won't stop this happening, the SMARTInk process needed to be stopped for things to work normally. I lost an entire day trying to figure this one out. Not sure if you are using SMART boards or not, or how you have user settings configured in your environment but for us this was the fix.

 

We use UEV and local profiles, so if they had run it before it was being launched at logon each time.

 

I added the following to a teacher workstation GPO:

Action Delete

Hive HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Key Path SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Value SMART Ink

 

Before getting this far I replicated the non-load situation then killed:

 

SMARTInk.exe

SMARTInkPrivilegedAccess.exe

SMARTInk-SBSDKProxy.exe

 

Then refreshed the page and it would load consistently each time.

 

Hope that helps some of you.

[ZeroHour]

I've had the same issue last week, only affects IE, Chrome is fine. Nothing shows in the web filter.

 

The issue for us was the SMARTInk service running in the background. I think it somehow creates an overlay which interferes with how Outlook loads in IE. You can turn off SMARTInk so the toolbar doesn't appear but that won't stop this happening, the SMARTInk process needed to be stopped for things to work normally. I lost an entire day trying to figure this one out. Not sure if you are using SMART boards or not, or how you have user settings configured in your environment but for us this was the fix.

 

We use UEV and local profiles, so if they had run it before it was being launched at logon each time.

 

I added the following to a teacher workstation GPO:

Action Delete

Hive HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Key Path SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Value SMART Ink

 

Before getting this far I replicated the non-load situation then killed:

 

SMARTInk.exe

SMARTInkPrivilegedAccess.exe

SMARTInk-SBSDKProxy.exe

 

Then refreshed the page and it would load consistently each time.

 

Hope that helps some of you.

 

Smells of an activex or dynamic hook in that case.

[TLARWise]

I've had the same issue last week, only affects IE, Chrome is fine. Nothing shows in the web filter.

 

The issue for us was the SMARTInk service running in the background. I think it somehow creates an overlay which interferes with how Outlook loads in IE. You can turn off SMARTInk so the toolbar doesn't appear but that won't stop this happening, the SMARTInk process needed to be stopped for things to work normally. I lost an entire day trying to figure this one out. Not sure if you are using SMART boards or not, or how you have user settings configured in your environment but for us this was the fix.

 

We use UEV and local profiles, so if they had run it before it was being launched at logon each time.

 

I added the following to a teacher workstation GPO:

Action Delete

Hive HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Key Path SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Value SMART Ink

 

Before getting this far I replicated the non-load situation then killed:

 

SMARTInk.exe

SMARTInkPrivilegedAccess.exe

SMARTInk-SBSDKProxy.exe

 

Then refreshed the page and it would load consistently each time.

 

Hope that helps some of you.

 

We do use SmartBoards here but it seems strange that the issue only came up in the past week or so and we have been using the Smartboard software with no changes for a couple of years now with no issue. We currently use v11.4, what version are you using?

[sbrade47]

Also 11.4 - exactly the same for us. It can't have been update related either as it was outside of the normal window to blame updates for us. I can only presume MS changed something in the Outlook Online site which now doesn't play nice. We are stuck on 11.4 due to the age of some of the boards and there is no way i'm paying to replace them

[clareq]

Thank you - testing now.

[clareq]

Initial testing shows it is fixed. Thank you so much, I would never have thought of that!

[sbrade47]

No problem, it was lucky I stumbled across this thread!

 

I used the registry key in the previous post in a GPO with item level targeting for teacher PCs then advised staff that they will have to manually start SMARTInk if they want to use the board. No complaints so far.

[TLARWise]

Rather than disabling SMARTInk completely I found this link KnowledgeBase - How to remove the SMART Ink overlay and hide the SMART Ink Toolbar for a single application that allows you to disable SMARTInk for Internet Explorer only leaving other apps to works as normal with SMARTInk. When modifying the NullOverlayConfig.xml file as well as adding the code for iexplore in the section there was also iexplore code in the section I had to remove.

[CraigM]

Thank you for this. We've been experiencing this as well the last week (just after I cut over to Office 365 to boot!) and it's only been happening in classrooms with you guessed it, SMART Notebook 11.4 installed. I will give this a look tomorrow and see if it cures the problem. This made me want to tear my hair out, goodness!

[free780]

I guess this is why SMART want you to pay a subscription.

[andyk1975]

Yes, same issue here too - all corresponds with what people have found. Removed / disabled Smart Ink and IE started to show emails again.

 

However, issue I have now is staff say they use Smart Ink all the time.........!

[staylor1972]

Does anyone have an MSI package for the Drivers and Smartink 12.2? I'm trying to install it using the command line at computer start up but it tries to downloading the English Handwriting Recognition software and fails the install.

[CraigM]

Does anyone have an MSI package for the Drivers and Smartink 12.2? I'm trying to install it using the command line at computer start up but it tries to downloading the English Handwriting Recognition software and fails the install.

 

I think you may need to extract the MSI's somehow from the EXE they provide. I don't recall being able to get the drivers stand alone in MSI format before. That's why I always downloaded the big bundle including Notebook, then customised that using their Install Manager.