Outlook connection issues with Exchange 2013 after Office 365 upgrade
One of the top benefits of migrating to Microsoft Office 365 is the fact that Microsoft automatically upgrades your Office software to the latest versions. However, they are not always without bugs. The latest upgrade issue is with the new version of Exchange 2013. This upgrade is actually creating a serious problem with Outlook. Once upgraded, Outlook can’t connect, and users will not be able to send or receive mail at all. Needless to say, this is a major problem for IT professionals, IT support providers, and users.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has not yet release a fix for this buggy update. Through trial and error and classic troubleshooting (and research) we found a fairly simple solution for this problem:
- Close Outlook.
- Go to Control Panel, Email, Email Accounts
- In Email Account, select click on the Name e.g. yourname@fedsolutions.com (this is user email address), then click Repair. This will automatically update the user mailbox connection setting via autodiscover for the domain name. The user needs to enter their email password for authentication.
- Click Close to update your setting.
- Open Outlook
- Outlook will ask you to restart to accept the new settings.
- Re-open Outlook, and make sure it is not connected Offline (lower right corner of the screen).
- NOTE: If you try these instructions, and there still is an issue, you will manually have to replace the server with “mail.office365.com” and Outlook should be able to find the mailbox.
We are hoping that Microsoft will fix this problem relatively soon. In the meantime, IT Support providers will have to devote quite a bit of time to manually correct this issue, particularly in environments with a larger number of mailboxes. Office 365 is a great product that many businesses in the Washington, DC area are migrating to, and it would be a shame for issues like this to continue with their automatic updates. If you receive an notification from Microsoft stating that your Office 365 account will be updated, we recommend that you plan to implement the workaround listed above. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
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