Question : Outlook 200x Problems Connecting to Exchange Server 2007

Hello,

We have an Exchange Server 2007 environment running under Windows Server 2008. Our client desktops are predominantly Outlook 2003 SP3 running under Windows XP. We have started replacement of our older desktops with units running Outlook 2007 under Windows Vista Business.

On some, but not all, of our desktops (both XP- and Vista-based), we are encountering errors when running Outlook.

** Problems with Windows XP/Outlook 2003 SP3 Machines **

1.      On affected PCs, when attempting to set up Rules and Alerts or going through the Out of Office Assistant, the following error comes up: You are currently working offline. To use this command, you must go online and connect to the Microsoft Exchange Server.
2.      When opening the address book and attempting to do a Find (for a certain name, say) the following error comes up: The search could not be completed. The connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.

** Problems with Windows Vista Business/Outlook 2007 Machines **

1.      On affected PCs, the Outlook Address Book is not available, coming up with the following error message: The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.
2.      When an address book download is attempted with the Download Address Book& option via the small button next to Send/Receive, the following error is displayed: Task Microsoft Exchange reported error (0x8004010F): The operation failed. An object cannot be found.
3.      When the Out of Office Assistant is clicked on, nothing shows up on the screen. In other words, no Out of Office dialog box is displayed.

** Problems with Both Types of Machines **

"      Outlook shows as Connected in the bottom right-hand corner. However, upon doing a Ctrl-right click on the Outlook icon in the tray to see the connection status, the connections to the Exchange server for Mail show as Established and the connections for Directory show as Disconnected. Clicking on the Reconnect button results in an attempt to re-connect, only for the Directory connection to fail a short time afterward.

** What Has Been Done to Attempt to Remedy the Problem **

1.      On one of the PCs running XP, the hard disk was cleaned (Disk Cleaner) and defragmented, the latest updates to Office 2003 and Windows XP were installed, and malware was removed. Even an attempt to repair Office 2003 was done. None of these efforts resulted in the problem going away.
2.      Microsoft knowledge base document 905813 was reviewed. The default offline address books were already selected in the affected mailbox stores and verified against other stores not housing affected mailboxes.
3.      The domain controllers were rebooted since one of them was exhibiting LDAP errors.

We have at least four (4) Vista-based PCs and five (5) Windows XP-based PCs affected by this problem as of this writing. The problem is, we are in the process of rolling out our first batch of Vista PCs (100+) and are afraid these are not going to be the only problematic PCs. The affected PCs are all connected into one network; in other words, no VPN or other remote connectivity issues need to be considered in this scenario. Outlook clients are also connecting natively to the Exchange server (i.e., via the LAN connection and not using Exchange over HTTP options).

Any assistance/ideas on how to resolve this would be VERY MUCH appreciated.

Answer : Outlook 200x Problems Connecting to Exchange Server 2007

Solving the problem actually required contacting Microsoft Technical Support in the end. Our Exchange environment was not aware of one of our DCs which was also a GC server.

Thanks to Exchange_Geek and all other contributors for attemptinf to solve this problem!