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Exchange Team Blog
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OffCAT’s replacement – Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant (SaRA)

The_Exchange_Team's avatar
Apr 17, 2018

After over five years of providing configuration information and solutions to known issues, the OffCAT team is planning to remove OffCAT from the Microsoft Download Center on May 31, 2018. The good news is that core OffCAT features have been consolidated with the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 (SaRA) tool at https://diagnostics.outlook.com/. This will simplify the lineup of troubleshooting tools available for Outlook while at the same time provide the same level of Outlook scanning capabilities as OffCAT. In addition, SaRA also offers several enhancements including the ability to identify and fix specific issues with Outlook, Office Setup, OneDrive for Business, and several other Office programs. We encourage you to transition very soon to the SaRA tool to scan for issues in Outlook. To help you with your transition, the OffCAT team compiled the following FAQ: Where can I get information on scanning Outlook with SaRA? Complete details on scanning Outlook for known issues or configuration information are available in How to scan Outlook by using the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant tool. Do I need an Office 365 account to run SaRA? To scan Outlook for known issues and to create a detailed report of your Outlook configuration, you do not need an Office 365 account. However, for most of the other scenarios provided in SaRA, you will need an Office 365 account. Will OffCAT be uninstalled during the SaRA installation? If already installed, OffCAT will not be automatically uninstalled when you install SaRA. OffCAT and SaRA use two separate installations that are not tied together. Will OffCAT rules continue to be updated? We are planning on updating and publishing OffCAT rules to the Internet through August 31, 2018. After this date, OffCAT will continue to function, but your scan results can be out-of-date. Will I still be able to view existing OffCAT scans? Yes. As long as you have OffCAT installed, you can view any OffCAT scan. Which OffCAT features are not found today in SaRA? The OffCAT team migrated the most frequently used features to SaRA. Here are the features that were not migrated and links to alternative resources (if available).

Note, SaRA does provide scenarios that identify and address issues with the following Office programs:
  • Outlook
  • Office Setup and Activation
  • OneDrive for Business
  • Skype for Business
  • KMS client activation

To troubleshoot KMS activation issues, we recommend these resources: Troubleshoot volume activation for Office 2016 Troubleshoot volume activation for Office 2013

  • Real-time logging
How do I request features for SaRA? We hope that SaRA was able to detect and possibly provide a fix for your Outlook issue. Regardless of the outcome, however, you can suggest features when you see the survey at the end of the scenario. Greg Mansius
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
  • wazzup987's avatar
    wazzup987
    Copper Contributor

    O365 Support engineer here, I use Sara as part of my job a bit when working with customers. Is it possible to get command line switches for SaRA? It would make my job a little bit easier as Sara has habit of erroring when going from SaRa to the scrubbing tool. Opening up to the scrubbing tool directly sans link would be of great assistance. The_Exchange_Team 

  • This is a crap. Now I can only scan Outlook but not my other Office applications. Why?

    Please bring Offcat back.

  • How are we supossed to troubleshoot MS Office apps other then Outlook without OffCat?