Sunday, August 31, 2014

O365, Outlook Clients, and Custom Domains

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, it appears that the IT consultant at the church-house is having some ongoing challenges getting the staff Microsoft Outlook desktop clients configured to attach to the new Microsoft hosted O365 Exchange (custom domain) accounts.

I believe the “migration” process went like this.

We had a custom domain and had been hosting the email on our own in-house Exchange server. Minor problems but we had an experienced Exchange/Server admin.  Then we suddenly didn’t.

Then we started having issues…and the domain got suspended, and the email stopped flowing, and problems compounded.

So the new IT consultant recommended moving to O365, getting a Microsoft-hosted Exchange platform but still using our (now restored) custom domain.

The staff have since been able to use the O365 web mail portal with their email accounts with no issues to send/receive their emails. However getting their desktop Outlook clients configured to point to the new custom-domain O365 Exchange host has been fraught with drama and failure.

I’ve been too busy with other “day-job” tasks to devote my basic Exchange/O365 troubleshooting skills to the task.

At the home-office we use O365 with Outlook clients and the account setup in the desktop client is auto-magical with our AD/domain account discovery process. Rarely do we have to deep-dive into advanced Outlook configuration options.

But this isn’t my normal playground, so I did do some basic web-searches on how the subject and the process seems pretty straight forward:

Next time I get off early and Lavie is still working, I’ll see if we can figure it out ourselves.

Or at least get enough notes and error dialogs in the process to sort out what is going on and pass them on to the IT consultant.

BTW, this seems like a good opportunity to remind the dear readers about Microsoft’s Office Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT) utility. Just saying that it might be a helpful diagnostic tool.

Download Microsoft Office Configuration Analyzer Tool 1.2 - Microsoft Download Center.

Cheers.

--Claus V.

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