Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Manual Outlook Configuration with Outlook 2016

With the release of Microsoft Outlook 2016, it is now no longer possible to manually add an Exchange account.  Exchange accounts can only be added to Outlook 2016 using Autodiscover.  If Autodiscover records aren't published, your administrator will need to publish them so Outlook can find the account.

In Outlook 2010 and 2013, users were able to manually add Exchange accounts to the Outlook client by selecting "Manual Setup".


Outlook 2016 manual setup now only supports Exchange Active Sync (EAS), a protocol which Outlook does not support with Microsoft Exchange as per https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/2859522

Outlook only supports "RPC", "RPC over HTTPS" and "MAPI over HTTPS" connections to Exchange server.

The Microsoft "Outlook.com" cloud service however does support EAS connections hence why the option is available in Outlook 2016.

If you try and complete a manual configuration for Outlook 2016, you will receive the following error.

"Log onto Exchange ActiveSync mail server (EAS): The server cannot be found"


Make sure you add the Autodiscover record to your public DNS or alternatively modify the hosts file with an Autodiscover record so the Outlook client can resolve the correct Exchange communication settings.

It is disappointing that you cannot select what method you wish to connect in Outlook 2016 when attempting to perform a manual setup.

Friday, December 9, 2016

How to Patch Windows Server 2003 with Error 0x80072EFF

I have a customer who has 3 forests all running Exchange 2003 on Windows Server 2003... yes in the year 2016 (almost 2017).  Before moving to Exchange 2010 --> 2016 we are required to consolidate with some cross-forest migrations.

I need to test some things in my lab before performing this migration in production so I built some 2003 servers... been ages!

After running the installation I had issues patching the servers and I found no information online around Error Number: 0x80072EFF - surprising as it seems like such a common error (is there really no one out there installing Server 2003 now?)

When clicking start and selecting Windows Update, this is the error I received.


After playing around for a good 15 minutes googling this error, I decided to upgrade Internet Explorer to version 8 (the highest supported on 2003 server).  This is downloaded from the following website for 32bit.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=20335

Note you will not be able to browse this website on Internet Explorer 6 so you will have to download the upgrade file from another computer then copy it onto the 2003 server.

After upgrading Internet Explorer to 8, I was able to follow the bouncing ball and install all the latest patches up until 2003 server went end of life.



Hopefully this has been helpful for anyone out there still needing to install Server 2003 (for non production use hopefully).

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