Live@Edu & Outlook (including 2003)

[PiqueABoo]

Prompted by another thread I'm currently trying to (reliably) understand what you can and can't do using Outlook to talk to your Live@Edu account.

 

It looks like O2K7 & O2K10 can just use AutoDiscovery to just set itself up and that will probably work, but I'm still stuck working on O2K3 which unfortunately won't entirely disappear completely from my world for a while yet.

 

Some of the Uni etc. user guides kicking around for this say no to O2K3, others have you configure IMAP. Just seeing that distinction makes me think the former are wimps because IMAP must be do-able.

 

Has anyone here stubbornly pushed this - O2K3 does do RPC/HTTPS so I'd have thought there is at least a faint chance you could make it happen, but the problem then would be using fixed server details as opposed to potentially dynamic ones from AutoDiscover.

 

[Alternatively, has anyone seen a succinct doc that is definitely about Live@Edu as opposed to standard windows live, that tells you which clients can do what right now?]

[PiqueABoo]

Guess whose star-sign is Taurus then? Via some output obtained earlier today from an Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) test with the Exchange connectivity tester I just configured an O2K3 profile to connect and it said:

 

"Your Exchange server administrator has blocked the version of Outlook that you are using. Contact your administrator for assistance"

 

I then used the remote powershell stuff to check the value of MAPIBlockOutlookVersions for mailbox "plans" (eek - all this lovely new jargon!) and it's empty which strongly suggests it is a "per server" restriction.

 

All of which seems fairly conclusive.. which after trawling through lots of fuzzy stuff, this is *good* even when it's not the outcome I wanted. But since the above connectivity test did make it all the way to the mailbox store I imagine O2K7 & O2K10 Anywhere will be OK, but I don't have one of those to hand right now so I'll save it for another day.

 

PS: Having just typed all that in carefully for the potential benefit of future budget-challenged edu-folk, I checked my mail and found an MS response (I'd asked them too) which makes it very conclusive: O2K3 MAPI isn't supported - apparently there's no public store to keep it happy on Live@Edu.. which is essentially the same story as Exchange 2007 when you say no to the installation question "Do you have any client computers running Outlook 2003.."

Edited September 12, 2010 by PiqueABoo
PS

[PiqueABoo]

Outlook 2007: Just worked as expected.

 

Well nearly... there was a proxy to get through, the initial autodiscovery ignored IE's proxy so I set WinHTTP one to make it happy.

[zag]

Hey, I'm just fighting with this myself.

 

How do you get outlook to get the proxy settings?

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/68416-live-edu-outlook-2010-client.html#post610119

[vikpaw]

don't you need to have a cname point set up on dns for autodiscover to work.

[PiqueABoo]

How do you get outlook to get the proxy settings?

 

This was Outlook 2007 on XP that apparently wouldn't pick up the IE proxy settings and I might have been in stupid mode and probably need to check it all over again, but to set the WinHTTP proxy go to a command prompt and type proxycfg -p some.proxy.name If it's Win7 you do this via netsh and you'll have to google how.

 

As mentioned above and in that other thread that DNS CNAME has to be present and correct first. I'm a bit suspicious about it apparently landing at your local Exchange server IIS at some point, although on a domain box the first of several places Autodiscovery looks is in AD so maybe that's something to do with it. If your live@edu domain is the same as a local one then maybe there's some unfortunate DNS conflict somewhere.