Outlook

After proving that analyzing and comparing Outlook's configuration on a PC against "well-known" problems and other issues with OCAT, the same team produces OffCAT, which can now analyze and tell you what's wrong (or potentially wrong) with Access, Word, PowerPoint and Excel as well as Outlook. Sounds good... and it does work!...More

Have you ever wondered why different places in Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 still refer to a now-archaic structure called an administrative group that was used as the foundation for server management in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003? Even stranger, the administrative group features the strange string “FYDIBOHF23SPDLT” that’s exposed if you perform operations such as examining the legacyExchangeDN of a mailbox....More

Those who pay attention to details (unlike me often) might have noticed that Outlook 2013 rejoices in its ability to connect to email servers using ActiveSync (EAS). And then they ask the question why can’t they connect Outlook 2013 to Exchange via EAS? After all, if EAS is good enough for Hotmail (aka Outlook.com), why isn’t it good enough for Exchange? After all, EAS worked in the preview version of Outlook 2013, so the block was introduced between the preview and final version. The answer is that Exchange absolutely will support EAS connections, but not from Outlook. In fact, Exchange probably supports more EAS connections from different devices than any kind of other protocol, largely because of Microsoft’s success in licensing EAS to vendors such as Apple, Google, and just about every manufacturer of an Android smartphone (this page provides a good overview of the various EAS client implementations). But when it comes to Outlook connectivity, Exchange has a strong preference for MAPI, including MAPI when it’s securely wrapped in HTTP as in the case of Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC over HTTP), which is of course the predominant protocol for Outlook in Exchange 2013. Sure, it would be technically possible for Outlook 2013 to connect to Exchange using EAS, but Microsoft has blocked that option in code for very good reasons. First, EAS is not as rich a protocol as is MAPI....More