Pages

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Outlook 2010 client unable to connect to newly deployed Exchange Server 2013

Problem

You’ve deployed a new green field deployment of Exchange Server 2013 in an environment, applied cumulative update 2 but notice that when you attempt to connect with an Outlook 2010 client, you notice that the configuration passes the Establish network connection step, then the Search for username@domain.com server settings step but fails at the Log on to server step with the the following error:

The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.

image

Clicking on the OK button will display the Microsoft Exchange window with the Microsoft Exchange server field filled with a:

GUID number followed by @domain.com

… and the Mailbox field with:

=SMTP:username@domain.com

image

Changing the *Specify the authentication method for external clients to use when connecting to your organization from:

Negotiate

image

… which Exchange gives the warning:

warning

Microsoft Exchange versions earlier than Exchange Server 2013 do not support the Negotiate client authentication method. Connectivity to public folders and mailboxes hosted on earlier versions may be affected.

image

… to:

NTLM

image

… does not resolve the issue.

Solution

I’m not sure why but one of the first few results from searching

outlook 2010 unable to connect to exchange server 2013

… was the following KB:

Outlook is unable to connect to Exchange 2013 public folder or auto-mapped mailbox
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2839517

… but the hotfix did not resolve my issue.

After trying multiple suggestions from various source I found from searching without any luck, I decided to first update Outlook 2010 RTM (no service pack version 14.0.4763.1000) with SP1 (version 14.0.6029.1000) which unfortunately did not fix the issue.  I then proceeded to download Outlook 2010 SP2, applied it and noticed that I was then able to connect.  The following is a screenshot of the version that was able to connect to the newly deployed Exchange 2013 server:

Version: 14.0.7106.5001

image 

A bit of a frustrating problem so I hope this post would be able to save someone the frustration and some time.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ran into this tonight. Same exact issue except clients are telling me outlook used to work before a power outage. Trying the SP2 install and will update afterwards!

ICS Cyber Security said...

Hi,
This post is extremely useful for me as it saved my lot of time. I have been struggling to learn about how we can digitally sign documents in Adobe. I got the complete solution to my problem in this article. Thanks.

pdf digital signature

Unknown said...

I have the same descried problem after migrating my exchange server 2007 to 2013. nothing solve the problem till this moment even the outlook 2010 SP2. most probably it is permissions problem

Omar Rob said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Omar Rob said...

I have the same described problem that happened after migrating my exchange server 2007 to 2013. nothing solve the problem till this moment even the outlook 2010 SP2. most probably it is permissions problem

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing this tool information it is useful to us.
Outlook Mail

Anonymous said...

Great info! Outlook upgraded to given version helped in my case as well (none of other 'hacks' worked)