Outlook Anywhere Question

[6Foot2]

I am trying Outlook Anywhere at home before letting it loose to staff and it is driving me batty.

 

I have checked all of the values I have entered and I am sure that they are correct. When I try to run Outlook for the first time after changing the connection settings it eventually comes back with:

 

"The name cannot be resolved. The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailible. Outlook must be online or conncted to complete this action."

 

I thought this looked like a DNS/name resolution problem at first but as I can ping the server name I do not now believe that to be the case. The only thought I have left now is that my machine at home does not belong to the domain. Do I have to do this on a laptop/desktop which is part of our domain to make this work? If not what else can I try?

 

Exchange: 2007.

Home version of Outlook: 2007.

Home version of Windows: Vista Business.

 

In Outlook I have selected Account Settings, then the Microsoft Exchange account name then "Change", "More Settings", "Connection", then at the bottom of that pane I have ticked "Connect to Microsoft exchange using http" In the next tab I have entered all of the site specific details needed to connect to the server. I state this here because I wanted readers to know that I have tried setting the Microsoft Exchange Proxy Settings and found it not to work thus far.

 

Outlook Web Access is working for my user now so it is not an Exchange/mailbox/mail user problem.

 

Anyone else having the same/similar problems?

[Oops_my_bad]

Do you have port 80/443 enabled to your exchange server? As you are running OWA I would assume so but sometimes OWA frontend & backend are seperate machines!

 

Dunno about 2007 but in exchange 2003 there is an option to enable RPC over HTTP - also for it to work seamlessly on and off site I would give your exchange server the same DNS name on the internet as it's actual name (although you might get away with an alias, not tried that though!)

[srochford]

This can be a complete nightmare to get working properly and the config process in Outlook is not friendly.

 

You can ignore that first error about not finding the name - just go through to the bit where you set up the RPC over HTTP and it should be OK. The instructions we give users are here for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 (think those are public URLs; let me know if not and I'll send you the contents!)

 

One other possibility is the SSL certificate - the name on it must match the server (eg if the certificate is for mail.domain.com then the cert name must also be mail.domain.com) and it must not be self-signed; it's got to be a fully trusted cert.

[6Foot2]

Ok, logging on this morning I found everything had gone from my in box [purely by chance this is not too important as I had only recently re-organised my in box to contain sub-folders and so I have lost 5 - 10 unimportant E-Mails as the lower folders seem unaffected. I think I will try testing on a dummy user until I can get this right.