Assuming the HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled attribute is set to $False on the mailbox or distribution group.

When an entry is missing in the Global Address List it is not necessarily needed but good to know if we can find the object in the GAL on the server.

If an entry is missing in the Global Address List you can query the GAL on the server:

Independently from the outcome of the above PowerShell commands I usually update the Offline Address Book and the Global Address List afterward.

I have put in the option to query the Global Address List for the missing entry because I usually do it.

Ok here we go > Update the Offline Address Book:

Now update the Global Address List:

In most cases, this solves it.
 
I usually wait 15 Minutes [ one AD sync cycle ] before notifying the customer.
The user should download the Address Book afterward or restart Outlook.
In OWA new entries should be visible straight away.
 

If the problem persists check the showInAddressBook attribute on the object in AD:

Compare the values of the attribute showInAddressBook with an account or DL that is available in the Global Address List and add them accordingly if one or more entries are missing.

If appropriate entries are missing here you wouldn’t get a result when querying the GAL for the missing entry at the beginning of this post. Further it is likely that HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled is set to $true.

When HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled is set to $true:

Find some examples at the end of this Microsoft description.
 
If all entries are visible in showInAddressBook you should be fine.
Otherwise add the missing entries under showInAddressBook.

 
Have a nice day!
 
 
Want to activate an Out of Office message while retaining the formating?

Out Of Office Multiline Message through PowerShell

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Exchange was not the culprit otherwise the problem would have affected all our clients. We assumed autodiscover respectively the order the affected clients connect as the cause, since we saw a similar behavior before > Outlook continuous password prompt

To keep it short we found the solution here :

In this YouTube video Grant Brown brings it straight to the point after he wiresharked the domains Outlook tries to connect to. ( Thank you ! )

The solution finally is to block Outlook from connecting to office365.com
Open the hosts file as admin and add the following entry:

This will prevent the client to connect to outlook.office365.com.

You can find the hosts file here :

A slow loading Outlook profile under these circumstances seems to occur when the mailbox is hosted elsewhere than on office 365 servers and an Outlook Click To Run client is used. We have suggested this fix to all affected Outlook users and it never broke anything.

Take in account to test this fix when you connect to O365 mailboxes and OnPremise from the same computer before you apply it.

Have nice day

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At the end of the last year we had a request from an existing customer to export the content of a few mailboxes they had hosted on O365 servers. In this O365 PST Export post I would like to share what we have learned and the most appropriate solution in our case.
The customer did not want to get technically involved into this migration. We specified the parameters for the exports and they gave us an admin account for their O365 tenant.

First I would like to point out that the solution or workaround we have used here is only appropriate for a smaller number of mailboxes, since manual interaction is needed.

The whole experience :

Prepare an account on source side with FullAccess to all mailboxes Solution

We have created a migration user in O365 with mailbox and granted FullAccess permission on all mailboxes in the customers O365 tenant.
It is faster to do this via remote-powershell. Connect and enter your credentials :

Once logged in grant FullAccess on all mailboxes to the migration user without Automapping.
Do not activate Automapping  because we will use Outlook for a proper O365 pst export.

O365 pst export via GUILearned

To bring it straight to the point. The outcome of this method didn’t fit our needs in any way. An eDisocvery will be performed and the results will be available for download in .pst format.
Unfortunately these .pst files have a folder structure beginning with the mailboxname , one level down you find ( in our case ) an ApplicationDataRoot  folder and the Top Of Information Store folder. The real mailbox structure begins here :

It would be confusing to anyyone to adapt these folder structures on the target mailboxes.

Since this method did not provide a real solution I will not go into details on how to make an O365 pst export via GUI.

Connect migration mailbox via Outlook and export mailboxes Solution

This step is the main part of the solution and why I mentioned at the beginning that it is only suitable for few .pst exports. We have connected the mailbox of the migration user via autodiscover and an Outlook 2016 client. This was the host for the evening

The next step was to disable Cached Mode. Outlook should be in online mode to prevent data loss through synchronization issues. This is also the cause for disabling Automapping. Outlook limits the auto mapped delegate mailboxes to 10 ( we had over 20 ). Further would Outlook have been overwhelmed with so many shared mailboxes in online mode.

After this we manually mapped the 1st mailbox to export ( Online Mode ! Important ! ) within the profile of the migration user. You can check the folder sizes on the server via right click on the root of the mapped mailbox > Outlook Datafile Properties.  Depending on the size of the source mailbox the O365 pst export can take an extended amount of time. The O365 server provided a good performance in download speeds but some mailboxes were about 18 GB.
We have experienced 2 or 3 connection losses to the O365 server at our first test. The final migration took place on a weekend. There were no further problems then.

Export the O365 mailbox via Outlook to a pst file :

Additionally Export Calendar as PSTSolutionLearned

In our tests we noticed that after an O365 pst export has been imported into the new target mailbox , there were no calendar entries. When querying the import request statistics with -includereport it turns out that all calendar entries have been treated as corrupted items. ( which counts against the bad item limit ). So the mailbox-importrequest needs to be triggered with a high bad item limit and -AcceptLargeDataLoss  or the calendar needs to be excluded from the import request.

To only export the calendar repeat the steps shown in the screenshots under point 3. Choose only the the calendar instead of the whole mailbox. When the calendar has sub folders ( what most likely is the case ) keep “Include subfolders” ticked.
We made these exports available for download to to the customer. End users were then able to map only the small calendar pst into their Outlook Client and drag the relevant items into their new mailbox calendar.

Import the O365 PST export to the target mailbox Solution

In compliance with the customer we have chosen to raise the bad limit in the mailbox-importrequest. The detailed import logs were provided to the customer as well. We use the -Priority Emergency switch to prevent an import request from stalling like described here

Track the import request with :

Copy the full report to the clipboard so that you can insert it into a text file :

Export and Import the next mailboxSolution

Close the mailbox – you just have exported and imported – in Outlook and map the next mailbox into the profile of the migration user. Repeat steps to

I hope this helps should you face the same problem with an O365 pst export.
If you know a more efficient way , where the effort fits the benefit , it would be nice to hear it. I know this is not the most elegant way to do this. But there was no other choice for this small quantity of mailboxes.

Have a nice day !

See how to import mailbox content with language settings

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Well , we do not offer public folders based on the shared character of the environment. For customers without Sharepoint , managing and sharing contacts via Sharepoint isn’t an option as well. The only thing what’s left is the classical way via Outlook.

You can create a mailbox before with the only purpose to share contacts out of it.

Ok , let’s get straight to it :

If you want to share certain contacts with certain people , create a new contact folder and fill it with contacts you want to share with e.g. colleague 1 and colleague 2.

Navigate to People in the bottom bar :

Click your default Contact Folder and create a new folder :

Right click the just created Contacts folder and choose Share > Share Contacts

Add the recipients you want to share Contacts with ( e.g. colleague 1 and colleague 2 ). If you tick in Recipient can add, edit and delete items in this contact folder you will grant Editor permissions to the recipients. In this example we want the recipients to be able to edit those shared Contacts. Click Send when you are done :

You will be prompted for confirmation. The persons you have chosen to share contacts with will be displayed with the granted permissions. In this case Editor, since we have checked this option before.

On recipients side open the just received Sharing invitation mail and open the Contacts folder out of the mail :

The shared Contacts folder will be added to your Contacts :

The recipients will be able to add – modify – delete contacts in the shared Contacts folder, since we have granted them Editor permissions.

A more convenient way to share Contacts directly through the permissions tab of the source Contacts folder could have been useful , but this way has its limitations though.
It appears you can just share your default Contacts folder. No sub folders can be shared, which is useful to share different contact folders with certain people. When this fits you your needs choose this way :

Grant the appropriate permissions on you default Contacts folder :

This will not trigger a sharing invitation mail but in the end we need the permissions, not the mail.

Conclusion :

Add new people you want to share dedicated Contact folders with ( sub folders of your main Contacts ) by sending a sharing invitation mail. Grant Editor permissions within the mail ( if you want your recipients to be able to add – modify and delete contact entries. )

Modify or remove permissions via properties and the permissions tab of your Shared Contacts folder.

Note:

It is not possible to use the shared Contacts from the address book by design.

Good Bye from client side today

You get continously prompted for a password in Outlook ?

Read how to solve it

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We won’t be able to deliver this message because the email address is no longer valid.

Additionally calendar delegates are not able to access the calendar of the person whose mail address displays the mailtip after it has been chosen from the GAL.

The Global Address List obtains the recipient’s address from the following fields which represent all the same attribute :

The value of the mentioned fields should be the same as the PrimarySMTPAddress or should at least contain an alias address from emailaddresses.  Otherwise the email address no longer valid message will be displayed as mailtip.

If you have just a few affected recipients it is easier to just paste the PrimarySMTPAddress into the E-mail field under the general tab of user properties.

When this issue occurs with more recipients you may want to change it in bulk by setting the WindowsEmailAddress to the same value as the PrimarySMTPAddress.
In our case this problem occurred when a customer initially synchronized an OU via our Microsoft Identity Management server. Later he changed the PrimarySMTPAddress for all his mailboxes on our platform but left the initial synchronized E-mail address in the source AD.
So the initial address got synchronized again overwriting the changes.

Hope it helps when an email address no longer valid message starts to get on your user’s nerves.

Enjoy the summer

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In the inquiries we received regarding this all admins stated that no changes were made to Outlook, the client PC or the internal customer network. It came from one day to another.
We checked all the obvious and some more specific possibilities on the clients which were :

Windows Credential Manager:Result : negative

• Make sure the current password is set under Generic Credentials in the Outlook / Office entry
• As second option delete the entry, start Outlook and and check remember password when prompted for credentials. A new entry will be created under Generic Credentials which represents the same situation like the 1st option.
• The 3rd option was to check if there are any other entries which can give us a hint where Outlook wants to connect to. ( there wasn’t )

Autodiscover:Result : negative

• Since users were able to send and receive mails and their Outook client was connected to Exchange successfully it could not really be an issue with Autodiscover trying to connect to a wrong server. To go for sure we set appropriate autodiscover entries in the hosts file. ( even when autodiscover was resolving correctly from the client )

Shared mailboxes – Sharepointlists – calendars within the Outlook profile:Result : negative

• We checked if there were any items from another shared mailbox integrated in the users Outlook profile, which could cause the Outlook continuous password prompt. ( This has already been checked with the 3rd option under Windows Credential Manager but you know the devil is in the details )

Skype:Result : negative

• Checked if Skype is configured at Startup. Some users had it some not. We made sure that there is no Skype in the background when starting Outlook. The password prompt appeared and stayed again.

Created a new profile:Result : worked out but not final solution we used

• This worked out. The Outlook continuous password prompt disappeared. We cannot say if the password prompt reappeared again after some time. Creating a new profile for customers with many users was no option ,so this was not the final solution we suggested.

What we have noticed:

All reports to this behaviour came from users using Outlook click and go with the following build version and build numbers:

Version 1707 – Build Nr. Build 8326.2107
Version 1707 – Build Nr. 8326.2096
Version 1708 – Build Nr. 8431.2079

I cannot say if this is only limited to these versions.

After all that has been done is mentioned ( maybe it helps you in your own troubleshoot ) I’m gonna wrap it up.

We opened a call by Microsoft. After the usual log collection steps and several tests they came up with a registry key :Result : Final solution

It seems the affected Outlook clients tried to connect to an Office365 endpoint as well. No one could tell us why it happened from one day ( all working fine ) to another ( Outlook continuous password prompt appeared ).

Microsoft said that Windows Updates were not responsible for this behavior. They assume that the password prompt occurs when a client accesses an O365 endpoint.

For example, when an old mailbox within the profile has not been deleted correctly and still an autodiscover request is made. When we take the fact that a new profile solves the problem without setting the registry key, this could be possible.

Update:

We had some scenarios where the users had the registry key in place already but the Outlook continuous password prompt still appeared. Outlook still wanted to connect to outlook.office365.com.
The solution was to add the following entry to the hosts file:

Update:

It seems there is a similar issue with opening attachments where Microsoft has released an update for O365. I found this info on Stephen Wagner’s blog ( Thx Stephen ! ).

See comments to this on Technet as well : Outlook 2016 prompting for login credentials when opening any email attachments

 
 
Problems with slow autodiscover ? Read this:

Autodiscover takes long time Outlook

The post Outlook continuous password prompt appeared first on Webbanshee.

However, to solve this issue on client side,  the external recipients having this problem, should be present in your Contacts folder.

It does not help to specify in the settings to send Emails in HTML format. You need to force it on the recipients.

See a server side solution here :

Winmail.dat Attachment Exchange

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This is caused by when Outlook tries several variants of autodiscover requests when establishing a connection. This can be solved by excluding time-consuming autodiscover lookups on client side.

The following 2 registry keys can be implemented to get around this behaviour :

Setting this key solved all issues we had users experiencing a delayed calendar content display in Outlook.

Please make sure to use the appropriate path for your Office version when navigating through the registry.

Office Versions :
2010 = 14.0
2013 = 15.0
2016 = 16.0

When setting up a new profile in Outlook and autodiscover takes ages please take a look at :

Outlook autodiscover takes a very long time

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This can be solved by implementing the following 2 registry keys on the PC running the Outlook client. ( Outlook should be closed )

Please choose the appropriate Office version when navigating down the registry path. ( this example is for Office 2013 = 15.0 ) :

Office Versions :
2010 = 14.0
2013 = 15.0
2016 = 16.0

The annoyance that autodiscover takes long time will be gone with these registry entries.

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