Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

Register Log in
  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Out of Office Assistant not working

Status
Not open for further replies.
mattmontalto

mattmontalto

IS-IT--Management
Feb 26, 2010
68
US
I recently had to reinstall our exchange server from the OS up. everything seems to be working fine, including owa from inside and out... I have attached a document that shows what I have done to try and resolve the problem, but to no avail....

I have exch 2007 sp2 running on win2003 std sp2. basically oof is not working... you get an error from outlook 2007 that your oof settings cant be displayed and that the server is unavailable...(yes logged on to the machine as the owner of the mailbox)

...if you try and access the oof settings from the owa, you can, but the changes you make do not seem to have the desired impact. Did the outlook connectivity test and autodiscovery seems to be working properly, and oof returns the correct url which I am able to browse to manually and see the xml... I have also checked the certificate and there seems to be no problem with it ... it is set to be used for smtp and IIS...

when I test outlook web services from the exchange cmdlet, I get "object reference not set to an instance of an object. At line:1 char:23 (see attached url for screenshot).

At this point, the only thing I am holding out hope on is that I see that microsoft .net framwork 2.0 service pack 2 has gotten installed.... I am hoping that uninstalling that will prove to be the solution as I have read that was an issue with Exchange 2007 sp1....

Other than that I am running out of ideas.... can anyone point me in the right direction? thanks
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Run it with an identity specified:
test-OutlookWebServices -identity:Matthew.montalto@rcda.nyc.gov

_______________________________________
Great knowledge can be obtained by mastering the Google algorithm.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
If it is your external domain name, do you have an internal AD DNS Zone for rcdaoffice.org with an A record for mail1? And do you have a CNAME record in your internal DNS for mail1 to point to the FQDN of mail1.rcdaoffice.org? If not, then your OOf is looking to your server through your public IP for mail1.rcdaoffice.org and that would possibly cause the OOF failure.

_______________________________________
Great knowledge can be obtained by mastering the Google algorithm.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
To TechyMcSe2k:

I get the same error when I run the test for any specific user and rcdaoffice.org is my internal (AD) domain name... Also mail1 is the server name which resolves to its correct ip and a pin -a resolves correctly to mail.rcdaoffice.org

Also, I have specified the internal and external address for oof to the same..(
I came across some other advise on the web that discusses removing and re-setting up all of the web services... below is what was suggested.... what do you think? here is what is suggested in the thread and here is the actual link to it....

------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
a. Open Exchange Management Shell, run command:

Remove-WebservicesVirtualDirectory -Identity "YourServerName\EWS (Default Web Site)"

b. Deleted the EWS virtual directory in IIS Manager.

c. Run command from EMC:

New-WebservicesVirtualDirectory -Path "c:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\Exchweb\EWS" -InternalURL " -ExternalURL " -WindowsAuthentication $True

New-WebServicesVirtualDirectory
d. Run command IISreset to restart IIS.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Your External URL for OOF should use a public name and you should also have an SSL certificate on your exchange server for that public name. There is no way for users outside of your network to resolve your mail1.rcdaoffice.org A public address needs to be setup and your WebServices URLs need to reflect this public name as well. when I roll out Exchange in different organizations, I change all of the WebServices URLs to the same public name. This includes the internal and external URLs. This way I can utilize the cheaper SSL certificate for the environment. There are about 4 URLs that should be modified. Some that can only be done throguh the Exchange Command-Line Console.

How to configure the Web Services URLs:

_______________________________________
Great knowledge can be obtained by mastering the Google algorithm.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
To TechyMcSe2k

Question in my mind is does the external url really matter in terms of outlook being able to access the OOF settings?... I would think that if my external url is wrong it would only impact out of office replies being sent,... but I would imagine that the Outlook client would still allow me to configure the settings... I can access the settings via the owa... but not the Outlook 2007 client... ?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
The problem is usually caused by one of the following reasons:

Reason 1: Wrong Autodiscover Service settings
Reason 2: Wrong certificate
Reason 3: Wrong permission settings on the EWS virtual directory.
Reason 4: Logged on with another user account (user logged into pc with a different domain than email account ie logged into to PC as MICHAEL\Rich and logged into email server as Richard\Mike)

reference: Also Read:
Users Cannot Enable Out Of Office Assistant When Using Outlook 2007

_______________________________________
Great knowledge can be obtained by mastering the Google algorithm.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Error message when you try to open the Out of Office Assistant in Outlook 2007: "Your Out of Office settings cannot be displayed, because the server is currently unavailable. Try again later"


_______________________________________
Great knowledge can be obtained by mastering the Google algorithm.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
here is what I get if I do a: Test-OutlookWebServices fl from the cmdlet on ther server... for some reason it chooses robert lenza to test with.... Then below is the test when I specify myself as the -identity... I am assuming that autodiscovery is working properly... It has the correct internal url and can successfully setup an outlook client..?

Id : 1003
Type : Information
Message : About to test AutoDiscover with the e-mail address Robert.Lenza@rcda.
nyc.gov.

Id : 1007
Type : Information
Message : Testing server mail1.rcdaoffice.org with the published name ail1.rcdaoffice.org/ews/exchange.asmx & ews/exchange.asmx.

Id : 1019
Type : Information
Message : Found a valid AutoDiscover service connection point. The AutoDiscover
URL on this object is discover.xml.

Id : 1006
Type : Information
Message : The Autodiscover service was contacted at g/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml.

WARNING: An unexpected error has occurred and debug information is being
generated: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Test-OutlookWebServices : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
At line:1 char:24
+ Test-OutlookWebServices <<<< |fl
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Forgot to add the output when run on a specific identity... here it is:


[PS] C:\Documents and Settings\strator>test-outlookwebservices -Identity montaltom |fl

Id : 1003
Type : Information
Message : About to test AutoDiscover with the e-mail address Matthew.Montalto@r
cda.nyc.gov.

Id : 1006
Type : Information
Message : The Autodiscover service was contacted at g/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml.

WARNING: An unexpected error has occurred and debug information is being
generated: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Test-OutlookWebServices : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
At line:1 char:24
+ test-outlookwebservices <<<< -Identity montaltom |fl
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
To TechyMcSe2k

Thanks very much for your post... good find on that article... As it turns out, I did obtain the hotfix KB976814 from Microsoft, but it did not work. I then did another windows update and after installing .Net 3.5 sp1 (KB951847) and I am happy to report that running "test-outlookwebservices" in EMS now completes successfully without error. Also, my outlook 2007 clients can now open the settings for the out of office assistant.

Now the only question in my mind is should I allow windows update to install any further updates to .Net 2.0 and 3.5...... A little afraid to let any go in now that it is working....

Anyway... thank you all for listening...

Matt Montalto




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Montalto
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

microsGuy16
  • Locked
  • Question
Global Address List Names not showing in Outlook OWA 365
Replies
0
Views
2K
microsGuy16
microsGuy16
IcarusHallsorts
  • Locked
  • Question
VBA to create output file of headers of selected emails
Replies
0
Views
1K
IcarusHallsorts
IcarusHallsorts
Rohit Bareja
  • Locked
  • Question
View and access only own records, and not the records by others on SharePoint.
Replies
3
Views
1K
garysm
garysm
Beni Santoso
  • Locked
  • Question
pop3 account setup failed at outlook because client was not authenticated to send anonymous mail
Replies
1
Views
106
DrB0b
DrB0b
m245
  • Locked
  • Question
Adding a disclaimer for all outgoing emails in Exchange 2013 Standard Edition
Replies
0
Views
1K
m245
m245

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top