Outlook 2010 includes some great, though rather less than obvious, troubleshooting capabilities. You can enable diagnostic logging from within advanced options of Outlook, and hidden within the application’s system tray icon is the option to test email auto-configuration as well as to determine what messages are displayed to the user.

Enabling this logging, and testing connections, are both great ways to diagnose connection issues and to determine whether any connection problems are on the client side, or the server side. If you’d like to learn more, please read on.

Enabling diagnostic logging cranks up the data generated by Outlook to 11, so it is not the sort of thing we want to just do and leave turned on. If you have a client with connection issues, it is the best way to generate detailed logs of what is going on between the client and the server. When this logging is enabled, Outlook will display a message in the title bar, and lots of disk activity will occur. Continue reading Troubleshooting Outlook 2010 connections

With the many email tools that users have available to them they are bound to run into problems and compatibility issues at one time or another. One of the activities that many email users employ is the ability to read their emails from outside clients other than Outlook. But when it comes to synchronizing your outside email accounts while at the same running Outlook then issues can arise.

Some email applications only support POP3 access to their end users email folders. While POP3 access from the outside will allow users the ability to read their email messages in an offline mode from other clients such as Outlook, that capability does not extend to being able to synchronize their external email with Outlook. Thus an end user can spend a lot of time performing a manual synchronization which can be a laborious process.

If employees within your company need to access their email from external sources other than Outlook then they can download their external email into Microsoft Outlook and read their email messages. Likewise, end users can delete those messages while running Outlook but those deleted messages will not show up as deleted within their external email applications.

Users can get around these constraints by running versions of their external email applications that support the IMAP protocol which will allow them to read and delete email messages via Outlook and have those read and delete actions reflected within their external email applications.

Continue reading 10 Tools for Synchronizing Outlook Email

Are your users on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange server  complaining about lethargic performance? Here are some things to troubleshoot when you want to quell the griping.

1. Antiquated Software. Are you still on Exchange 2003? That old 32-bit warhorse will have a tough time meeting the email demands of a modern organization. New 64-bit versions of Exchange–2007 and 2010–support more memory and bigger buffers, as well as other speed enhancements. As a result, they can be from five to 10 times more efficient than 2003 in handling mail. While upgrading to a new version of Exchange isn’t an immediate solution to your problems, it’s something to advocate as a long term solution.
2. Mailbox Limits. Both Exchange 2003 and 2007 have 2GB limits on mailbox sizes. However, Outlook users can  exceed those limits. The rub is, the greater that 2GB limit is exceeded, the bigger the hit the user will see in performance. One way to address that problem is to deploy an archiving solution. It will automatically archive a user’s emails when his or her mailbox approaches or exceeds the 2GB limit.
3. Overstuffed Folders. Too many messages stored in a single folder will impair Outlook’s performance. Microsoft recommends that between 3500 to 5000 messages should be placed in a single folder. An archiving solution can address this folder problem, too, as well as creating more top-level folders or sub-folders in folders with high growth rates such as Inbox, Sent and Calendar.
4. Anti-Virus Software. Local anti-virus software can make Outlook work harder than necessary. Each time a message is opened, its body and any attachments to it are scanned by the anti-virus software. That can result in delays of as much as 20 seconds. An alternative to local virus scans is to scan messages in transit at the Exchange Hub Transport servers. With malware scans performed at the servers, you can disable scanning at the client end of things and boost performance for your users.
   Continue reading 10 reasons why Outlook is running sooooo slowly

In large organizations it can be a very convenient capability to allow some of your co-workers access to your calendar. This feature supports collaboration and helps to avoid over scheduling of meetings and appointments. Along with that capability is another feature that can allow other users access to your mailbox. This other feature is referred to as granting delegation access.

Granting access for other users to access your mailbox understandably involves a very large amount of trust. However the benefits can be worth it if the conditions exist to give someone else access to your email. But disregarding the privacy issues there can also be problems with granting delegation access.

There are two methods used for granting someone else access to your email:

1. Granting Delegate access:  This method is used to grant access to one or more of your Outlook folders. These folders can include: Calendar, Inbox, Notes, Tasks, Contacts and Journal. The users who you grant delegate access to will also have the “Send on behalf of” right explicitly granted to them. The delegated users can access the delegated folders by clicking on “File”, then “Open” and then clicking on “Other Users Folder”. Delegated access can be restricted through additional steps if necessary. Note that a delegate can be given different permissions for different folders. This allows the owner to control access to items in their Exchange mailbox. Usually if access to your calendar or inbox has already been granted without any problems then the “Send on behalf of” capability can also be given at the discretion of the owner of the inbox.
2. Granting specific folder permissions: This method is probably the best one to begin with when giving someone else access to your inbox and other folders. This method provides the same functionality as the Grant Delegate access method but it does not automatically give the “Send on behalf of” right to the specified users who are given permissions to your folders. In addition the “permission granted” users will need to add your mailbox folders to their own Outlook account. Once they have added your folders to their account then they will be able to see only those folders which they have been given permission to view.

Granting access to others to view your mailbox and other folders, and to respond to your email messages received, should be implemented only after one has set up rules and policies to guide the granted delegate in what manner to use your mailbox and what the boundaries are for responding to email messages. Failure to do so can result in leaked email messages and confidential company information.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Delegated Email Issues

Hosted Exchange deployments will grow 4% in next four years.

Within the next four years the installed base of mailboxes for Microsoft Exchange Server is expected to grow at an annual clip of 12 percent, rising from 310 million this year to 470 million in 2014.

That’s the prediction of the Radicati Group, a market research firm based in Palo Alto, Calif, in a recent report released on the worldwide Exchange market.

The researchers looked at both on-premise and hosted deployments. Right now, though, on-premise deployments have the lion’s share of mailboxes around the globe. That won’t change much by mid decade. However, there will be a shift toward the cloud, as the on-premise approach slips from 76 percent of worldwide mailboxes to 72 percent of them.

The report divides the off-premise market into two segments. Hosted Exchange Maiboxes are cloud-based services offered by hosted email providers, including Microsoft with its Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. Managed Exchange Mailboxes are generally offered by large consulting and professional services organizations, such as HP, IBM Global Services and others. The Managed Exchange segment’s mailbox share will remain flat at nine percent through 2014, according to the report. The Hosted segment, though, will grow four percent from 2010 to 2014, to 19 percent from 15 percent.

Stoking the growth of hosted email will be an increased acceptance by organizations of software as a service solutions.

“Much of the new growth will come from the SMB [small business] sector, where customers are migrating away from on-premises solutions or upgrading from more basic hosted solutions based on POP mailboxes,” the report noted. “However, we expect that a substantial number of medium, large and even very large organizations will increasingly adopt a Hosted Exchange solution.”

Continue reading Exchange to grow at 12% clip to 2014

More and more companies are allowing employees to work from home via remote offices. Outfitted with high-speed internet, separate phone lines for fax and business calls and office white boards and most office workers are ready to be productive as if they were working in any office environment complete with interruptions – though not the usual kind.

One of the interruptions remote office employees will most often face is that of remote connectivity problems. The problem of a remote connection being down is that it is sometimes hard to pinpoint the exact cause of the remote connectivity issue.

For instance, users have reported remote connectivity problems when running Exchange 2003 on a Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. Remote users will experience “disconnected” status issues when connected remotely and Outlook will be displayed as being in “offline” mode. However, when users are in their company’s office they do not have any problems connecting to their Exchange mailbox while using Outlook 2007. And running in cached exchange mode does not appear to help either.

One of the first steps that an administrator should perform is to verify whether the Virtual Private Network (VPN) is working correctly or whether it is part of the problem. An administrator can bypass the VPN by configuring Outlook to communicate with the Exchange server via Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) over Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This will allow the administrator to confirm whether the remote communication problem still exists even when not using a VPN connection. If there is still a remote connection issue, while running RPC over HTTP, then the administrator will know that VPN is not part of the problem.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Unavailable Exchange Server

It’s important for every environment to run as securely as budgets will allow. And in these times budgets are limited so administrators and IT directors must balance the funds available with the security needs of the organization.

One component of maintaining a secure environment is that of securely sending and receiving email. However problems can occur due to incorrect settings, incompatibilities and sometimes problems with services binding to the wrong Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates and external URLs – which will be the focus of this article.

When administrators initially set up Exchange server they will be asked to create a self-signed SSL certificate which will be used to identify the internal NETBIOS of the machine that is used to run the server.

An issue that may result from using the self-signed SSL certificate can be observed during the connection process to an outside URL. An SSL error popup message may show up indicating that the external URL site’s https URL is not the correct site address for the SSL Client/Server socket (connection). For instance, the popup window might say something about the “https” URL, such as https://yourserver(dot)yourcompany(dot)com/, not being the correct name for the SSL Client/Server connection.

Remember that Secure Socket Layer (SSL) was originally developed as a way to secure the internet connections between web browsers and web servers. Developed by Netscape in 1994, the Secure Socket Layer can be used in other applications such as Telnet and FTP.

Continue reading Internal SSL Errors and Outlook

Most organizations use a directory service to find email addresses of users who are not listed in local address books or not listed in corporate directories such as the Global Address List. One of the most often used directory service providers out there is known as a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol server, more commonly described as an LDAP server.

LDAP originally provided access to ISO X.500 directory service. But it has grown to also support various directory services, namespace, access protocol and rules. It also describes their interactions based on the X.500 model.

Clients can access the LDAP server and make requests for information contained in the directory. Email clients would be interested in locating email addresses of people who are not in the local directories. An LDAP server can also be used to answer requests from web browsers, management applications and other such clients. If the LDAP server queried cannot provide the information requested then it can forward the request to another LDAP server.

In the Microsoft world both Exchange Server and Outlook support LDAP. Email clients can submit queries in search of email addresses of users outside their internal directories.

There is an Office Customization Tool (OCT) which will allow an administrator to configure LDAP search actions such that certain searches are disabled or passed through custom filters. A Group Policy setting can also be used to limit LDAP searches. Custom filters can be implemented and provided to end users by changes made to either the Outlook Profile (PRF) file or by making changes in the registry.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Outlook and LDAP Issues

Password problems can be perplexing – sorry I couldn’t resist the tongue twister

Seriously, administrators will have the challenge of correcting password issues under time constraints as business activities and users are all working toward completing projects on time. So having a tool chest of techniques for solving and correcting password issues is a requisite of any good administrator.

One problem that you will encounter from time to time is when passwords are not being kept by Outlook even though they have been specified to be retained. This may happen even if the “Save Password” box has been checked.

Several solutions have been offered on the internet.

Deleting User Account Information

One solution involves deleting the user account information and resetting the password. This method involves making changes to the Registry. As always, anytime you touch the registry you should always back it up first.

There are other times when Outlook doesn’t remember the passwords after the operating system has been reinstalled. The system is configured correctly in that the correct passwords are in the account properties but when the end user attempts to send or receive an email they get the username and password dialog box popup.

Disabling Prompts

Another solution you can try is to disable the prompt that asks to save passwords. You can do so by bringing up the Control Panel by going to the lower left corner of the screen and clicking on the Start button and then click on Control Panel. Once you have the control panel up you should then double click on Internet Options and select the Content tab. Next, click on the AutoComplete button in the Personal Information section. Check the box for “User names and passwords on forms” and uncheck the box for “Prompt me to save passwords”. You should now close Outlook and then restart it and try your password again.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Outlook Password Problems

As an administrator you are often called upon to upgrade Office and other Microsoft products for your end users. You also know that getting error messages are part of the process and that very few upgrades are smooth.

One of the error messages you may receive, after upgrading Office XP, is an error message indicating that MAPI was unable to load the information service Pstprx.dll.

This can happen if you were upgrading and you were also using Microsoft Outlook in Internet Mail Only (IMO) mode. If you remove Office XP and then revert back to Microsoft Office and then try your upgrade again you might receive a MAPI error message when you attempt to restart Outlook. Oftentimes this happened with upgrades involving Microsoft Office 2000, Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002.

Continue reading How to fix loading of Information Service Pstprx.dll