Hi,
I was sent here from the Exchange forums.
The original thread is: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrclients/thread/ea798a34-d009-4158-a50d-05b494e8c718/
It would be great if someone could take a look at this very weird issue and point me into the right direction or suggest some way to debug that.
Thanks for reading!
I have 2 fresh installs of windows server 2012. One has the DC role, the other one is domain member + exchange.
The active directory was just setup in order to be able to install exchange, so nothing was configured manually apart from the installation process.
All user accounts in active directory have been created by exchange in the process of adding new mailboxes.
The weird thing is that local user accounts have no problems setting up an Outlook profile for Exchange, while domain accounts are struggling.
Even more weird is that the very first domain user account logging in per workstation is able to complete setup outlook -> exchange.
Once this is done and the user logged out, noone else logging in on that workstation is able to setup an (the first) outlook profile for Exchange anymore.
After the autodiscover process (the second checkmark) succeeds, when Outlook uses the username (=primary smtp address) + password for the first time to complete the setup of the profile an error appears: "Theconnection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action."
I've tried that with 3 different, freshly installed Windows XP SP3 Clients.
I used a different user account when logging in for the first time after domain join on either of them. All of these accounts were able to complete the Outlook setup wizard. While the next account on the same workstations wasn't able to.
It's like that: 3 accounts: user1,user2,user3 and workstation1,2,3
User1 -> workstation 1 --> success (first user account to login on that workstation)
User2 -> workstation 1 --> fail (second user account to login on that workstation)
User2 -> workstation 2 --> success (first user account to login on that workstation)
User1 -> workstation 2 --> fail
User3 -> workstation 3 --> success
User3 -> workstation 2 & workstation 1 --> fail
etc, etc.
When user 2 on workstation 1 failed, I logged out and back again with User1 to check whether it still worked and yes, everything was fine.
Then I noticed that only Windows XP was affected by that issue.Windows 7 clients have no problems.
I would have thought about a certificate common/alternative name problem, but as mentioned earlier local user accounts don't have those problems. Also user accounts in an old nt4 domain don't have those problems.
After 1 week of trial and error I discovered that sometimes there was an exception and another user account was able to setup an outlook profile. This is however hard to reproduce and definitely not linked to certain accounts. It's kinda random. Could this be a problem with some kind of time out/session/machine&user?
Does anyone have any idea what could be the cause of that or where to start looking?
Thank you very much for any help! this really is driving me crazy ;)