Jan 17 2019 01:27 PM
Just beginning our Office 365 deployment to the desktops and will migrate to the hosted exchange model after we've deployed the software. But we've run into one caveat.
If we install Office 365 on machines that have had a previous version of Office installed, and an account configured in Outlook, the Office 365 sees that and properly configures Outlook to point to our local exchange server.
If we install Office 365 on a new machine that did NOT have a previous user profile/Outlook configured, it automatically configures the user account to point to the outlook.office.com hosted server.
What do I need to do to allow me to properly configure the user account to point to our local exchange server until that point in time when we want to migrate to the hosted exchange?
Jan 17 2019 02:46 PM
Jan 18 2019 02:18 PM
HI Chris,
Apologies for the delay. I've attempted to setup the profile manually. Each time I try this and enter the account/email address it then takes over and doesn't allow me to manually add the server.
Maybe this is the norm but my user accounts in O365 are their email addresses. And the email address is the same ID I put in to configure their Outlook.
So once O365 is installed and configured with the O365 account I attempt to modify the account that was created. I've been hesitant to completely remove the account due to the fact that Skype, OneNote & OneDrive all work as anticipated. And Skype works with our on premise Skype server. It's just the Outlook that drives the connection to the hosted exchange server.
The O365 Outlook account for a user, that points to the hosted exchange, points to outlook.office365.com. A user account that points to my local server points to my domain. I searched through the registry between 2 different computers, one presenting the O365 issue and one that works as intended, and found many entries that referenced the outlook.office365.com. I compared the registry entries but was not able to come to a definitive conclusion that would resolve my issue. As mentioned, there are many entries in the registry I could modify and attempt to resolve this by trial and error. But I'd rather not take that approach.
Jan 18 2019 02:45 PM
Jan 18 2019 02:54 PM
Jan 18 2019 03:04 PM
Jan 19 2019 12:26 AM
SolutionI wouldn't advise manual config, as while it's still technically possible, it hasn't been "supported" for a while. I do think I have an idea of what's causing the issue though - the new "Check for Office 365 as priority" step in the autodiscover process, which fires even before the SCP lookup does. The bad news is that the only way to disable this step is via registry changes: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3211279/outlook-2016-implementation-of-autodiscover
Jan 19 2019 12:46 AM
Jan 25 2019 05:40 AM - edited Jan 25 2019 05:53 AM
Hey Vasil, thanks for that link. Doing a little more digging and this one specific entry resolved this for us as Chris was eluding to.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\outlook\autodiscover
DWORD: ExcludeExplicitO365Endpoint
Value = 1
Eventually finding that quick answer here as well: https://www.gothamweb.com/portal/index.php/knowledgebase/8/Outlook-bypasses-AutoDiscover-and-connect...
I'd also like to add that the addition of this one reg key was enough to resolve our issue. We didn't need to modify autodiscover.xml or the AutoD.user.xml after adding that.
Thank you Vasil and Chris! Much appreciated.
Jan 19 2019 12:26 AM
SolutionI wouldn't advise manual config, as while it's still technically possible, it hasn't been "supported" for a while. I do think I have an idea of what's causing the issue though - the new "Check for Office 365 as priority" step in the autodiscover process, which fires even before the SCP lookup does. The bad news is that the only way to disable this step is via registry changes: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3211279/outlook-2016-implementation-of-autodiscover