AutoMapping Shared mailbox issues

[Dan Snape]

Just wondering if anyone else has observed an issue where users are happily working with automapped shared mailboxes in Outlook 2013, but after one user is upgraded to Outlook 2016 and continues to access the shared mailbox successfully, the Outlook 2013 users lose access to the mailbox.

All users are still able to access the mailbox via OWA, so the permissions are OK. Adding and removing FullAccess permissions on the shared mailbox via powershell does not fix the issue. The only fix we have found is to upgrade the other users to Outlook 2016. We have replicated this issue across a single user logged in to two different workstations, one with Outlook 2013 and one with Outlook 2016. Only on the workstation with Outlook 2016 can the user access the shared mailbox.

[#2]

If you can reproduce it reliably, I'd recommend opening a support case. Personally I havent heard of anything that might explain this behavior.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

AutoMapping relies on AutoDiscover, so you probably have some AutoDiscover issues on the domain of the shared mailbox and it works fine in Outlook 2016 because it has a feature called Direct Connect (to Office 365) which is not available in previous versions.

[#4]

I'm not sure it is AutoDiscover, because the autodiscover repsonse XML file has the problematic shared mailbox listed as an AlternateMailbox, so it should be mapping in Outlook. We have logged a ticket with Microsoft.

[#5]

After some further investigation it turns out that the targetAddress atribute for this mailbox was not pointing to the xxx.mail.onmicrosoft.com SMTP address as required for a Office 365 Hybrid environment, thus AutoDiscover was in fact failing for this particular mailbox. Outlook 2016 was working due to the Direct Connect to Office 365 process. Thanks for helping point us in the right direction!

[#6]

Good find.

We found our Service Desk were not adding this address as well!

Issue sorted.

Thank you!

[#7]

User upgraded to Outlook 2016 successfully. Interacts with the Shared Mailbox through Auto Mapping successfully. But doesn't work when using Outlook 2013. 

To clarify, is it Outlook 2013 on the other users computers thats not working, or the one that upgraded to Outlook 2016?

[#8]

It was the Outlook 2013 client that was not working