We’ve been having various problems with outlook2k3 when the clients have been synchronising with the server. The error message that they are getting either contains 0x80040115 or 0x8004011D. This only happens when the offline address book is being downloaded. Unfortunately, the address book that they are trying to download is from a server that no longer exists and in the “home domain” of the client desktop machine. What they should really be downloading is the addressbook that is stored on the new exchange server. I spent a couple of hours searching on google and following lots of dead ends before starting to investigate further into the realms of registry, user profiles and permissions…….See more for the fix.
I knew about the /GB switch with exchange as there was more than 1GB line on the machine but I didn’t know about the The /USERVA Switch
switch. I do now though!
What I’d like to know is that if you MUST put this in the boot.ini why doesn’t the installation program do it for you? I wouldn’t have thought it would be difficult to check the OS and the memory capacity and edit a boot.ini or at least warn you in a popup that you need to do it.
Whenever anyone sends you the latest round of funny pictures or pictures of their new baby and you use outlook, it is a pain to save the files to a location and then open them up into your viewing program. Using the tools at the Office Developer Center: Viewing Multiple Picture Attachments in Outlook 2003, it should be a lot easier to do this. I’ve not tried this yet but will do pretty soon.
Not sure how much there is to say about using offline address books (apart from the obvious fact that you need one) in Outlook but the Exchange Team have released Best Practices for Using Offline Address Books – this will be useful reading I’m sure as I’ve had problems with them recently and I guess if they’ve written a guide about it, then there must be more to it.
I’ve been changing some more user profiles in outlook this week as we’ve moved users across to a new server. On almost every machine I’ve had to blow away the user profile in outlook and recreate a new one.
The latest error message I got was on a client machine connecting to the lan via a VPN connection and getting a message “The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server computer is down for maintenance.” The weird thing is that I could telnet to the server, ping it, resolve names – just not open the mailbox on the server. After checking various things such as firewall configs,rpc ports I created a new profile – and it worked. Deleted the old one, tried to recreate it as best as I could and now the user is happy.
After a tipoff from KC Lemson after I emailed my likes and dislikes to their exchange team (as she requested), I’ve installed the latest hotfix rollup for Exchange which includes a fix to the problem where Mail to a Public Folder Is Set as IPM.Post Instead of IPM.Note. We subscribe to mailing lists and use public folders as incoming “mailboxes” (like a distribution list but only one destination to prevent more than one person trying to action an incoming email. Instead they move the email into an actioned folder once they have actioned the email. Anyway – once the hotfix has been applied you need to edit the registry as per KB 817809 and bounce the information store. As we’re having a power cut at 12.30 today, the bounce will occur then and I’ll be able to test these changes.
I’m thinking of turning off the preview pane in Outlook 2000 as a group policy to stop people using it and infecting themselves with a lot of the latest patches (as we don’t service pack office). I think it would annoy quite a few users though.
Exchange FAQs will be an interesting source of help for exchange.
As part of the move to the Azur Group I need to add email address’s of the other users to our mail server. Apparently Microsoft have a utility, csvde, which allows you to Import Contacts and User Objects into Active Directory as documented by this knowledge base article. However there are several changes you need to make to the source file, extracted from Exchange 5.5 and the mappings that need changing are described in KB 281563. The daft thing is that the first page tells you that you need to change various field names, giving examples and to see the second page for more information. But the second page doesn’t mention the examples that they use. So in the end I recreated the contacts by hand.
obj-class