Outlook 2003 Going Auto Offline

[satchi]

Hello, my office is running Win 2k Server with XP Pro clients, with Outlook 2003. For some reason, Outlook goes to 'offline' status at random times. They could surf the web with IE, which indicates that We have a small office (about 30 computers).

Any possible reasons why a client's Outlook would automatically become offline?, while some never exhibit the same problem?

I was thinking that some people may have accidently hit the 'Work Offline' option when they go to File-->Print, but I doubt a handful of people would all do the same thing?

Thanks in advance...

 

[tamtam]

We have been having a similar problem. We just upgraded our entire sales force from Outlook XP to Outlook 2003, using cached mode. The sales reps work out of their home and are connected to our office using high speed Internet access (Cable or DSL) and VPN. Some have had the mode automatically switch from Connected to Offline. I know that if the connection speed is too slow, it will switch to Disconnected, but I am not sure why it is switching to Offline. When it is in Offline mode, it does not change back automatically if it does detect a connection. All of the laptaps are running WinXp SP 2, Office XP SP 3 and Outlook 2003 SP 1. Thank you.

 

[satchi]

One thing I noticed is that when an 'Online' status disconnects automatically (via disconnection of wire, break in network connection between client and computer, etc.), the status becomes 'Disconnected'. During this state, the client tries to auto-reconnect between a short interval, and eventually does once connection has been restored.

The status that I've been seeing on the clients were 'Offline' statuses, which does not perform the auto-reconnect feature.

Normally, the 'Offline' status is made when a user manually break off the connection (via 'Work Offline'). Other than human error (the Work Offline command is under the Print command after all...), i'm not quite sure how to research this problem.