Focused Inbox for Outlook is delayed

When Microsoft announced Focused Inbox for Outlook and Outlook on the Web (OWA) in July they planned to release the new features to First Release customers starting early September 2016. Roll-out to the 4th ring of customers was scheduled for October.

One month between First Release and GA may seem much, but for organizations that need some more time to understand the impact and communicate the changes with the end-users, a month isn’t that much time.

But more importantly, September has already passed and we have not seen the new feature to appear nor any new updates on the Office Blog or documentation for administrators.

Last week I attended Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta and had the pleasure to speak with some members of the Outlook time. My understanding is that the feature is ready, the documentation has been written but the actual deployment has been rescheduled to the November/December timeframe.

Microsoft has promised to do a better job than they did with the roll-out of Clutter. Documentation for admins should be published before launch to First Release tenants. If you want to be prepared, read up on Focused Inbox admin controls in my previous article.

What every Office 365 admin should know about supported Outlook versions

Working with customers that are beginning to consume Office 365 services I see a lot of confusion about whether their old Office version should work with Office 365. Especially when we’re talking Office 2010 or even 2007. What certainly not helps is that Microsoft restructured their Office 365 documentation in such a manner that it is hard to find all relevant information.

The general Office 365 for Business requirements states the following:

Make sure that your Office clients are compatible with Office 365. Office 365 works with any version of Office in mainstream support: the latest version of Office, Office 2013, and Office 2011 for Mac. Previous versions of Office clients, such as Office 2010 and Office 2007, may work with Office 365 with reduced functionality.

The requirements for Exchange Online are more restrictive and definitely clearer, although they are hidden in the Exchange 2016 system requirements page:

Exchange 2016 and Exchange Online support the following versions of Outlook:

• Outlook 2016
• Outlook 2013
• Outlook 2010 with KB2965295
• Outlook for Mac for Office 365
• Outlook for Mac 2011

Outlook clients earlier than Outlook 2010 are not supported. Email clients on Mac operating systems that require DAV, such as Entourage 2008 for Mac RTM and Entourage 2004, are not supported.

So your users are still on an older Outlook 2010 build without SP2 and the April 15, 2014 update? Not supported. Outlook 2007? Not supported. From experience I can tell that these requirements are not a joke, your users will not be able to connect to Exchange Online with Outlook 2010 RTM. Another customer saw Outlook 2007 crashing after moving the mailboxes to Exchange Online and was able to work-around this by removing the language pack.

So if we like it or not, consuming a cloud service equals losing control about what client software you’re using. It’s the cloud provider that dictates the supported versions and when they think you should upgrade. That brings me to the final point, that these requirements not static and change over time. So make sure you visit the sources regularly to see of there have been updates.

How to remove the Exchange Autodiscover SCP

Consider a scenario where you moved all your user’s mailboxes to Exchange Online, for instance after a cutover or staged migration and want to remove any dependencies on the local Exchange server. You may find that Outlook still connects to the local Exchange server for Autodiscover lookups, this is because Outlook is hard-coded to query an AD Service Connection Point to locate a server with the Autodiscover service. When this fails Outlook falls back to the next DNS based methods or uses a local XML file.

Exchange Management Shell

There are multiple ways to prevent Outlook from contacting the local Exchange server first, some of them make more sense than others. The preferred way is to use the Exchange Management Shell to clear the entry for the Client Access server from the SCP.

Set-ClientAccessServer –Identity ServerName -AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri $null

This removes the SCP entry for this Exchange server.

ADSIEdit

If the above method can no longer be used a low level AD editor as EDSIEdit can be used to remove the SCP manually. The full path of the SCP is:

CN=ServerName,CN=Autodiscover,CN=Protocols,CN=ServerName,CN=Servers,CN=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT),CN=Administrative Groups,CN=OrganizationName,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=DomainName,DC=Suffix

This object to remove has the Class type serviceConnectionPoint.

Alternative methods

One of the above steps is basically all you need to do. Alternatives include adding an ExcludeScpLookup value to the \Autodiscover registry key (KB article) and some articles even let you remove the Autodiscover virtual directory from IIS. This will of course make Outlook unable to query the local Exchange server for Autodiscover but why should you if you can simply remove the SCP.

How to verify?

As always, the proof is in the pudding. Use the Outlook test E-mail AutoConfiguration feature to verify the clients behavior. We’re specifically interested in the Log tab where we should see that Outlook is no longer able to query the SCP to obtain the Autodiscover url.

To start the Test E-mail AutoConfiguration tool, follow these steps:

1. Start Outlook.
2. Hold down the Ctrl key, right-click the Outlook icon in the notification area, and then click Test E-mail AutoConfiguration.
3. Verify that the correct email address is in the E-mail Address box.
4. In the Test E-mail AutoConfiguration window, click to clear the Use Guessmart check box and the Secure Guessmart Authentication check box.
5. Click to select the Use AutoDiscover check box, and then click Test.

Earlier I wrote a short article about this tool, unfortunately available in Dutch only: Autodiscover testen met Outlook. But you’ll get the general idea. Focus on the first or third tab when you’re interested in the Autodiscover results, read the Log tab when you're interested in the Autodiscover process.

Office 2016 update branches and how to force an upgrade for Office 365 ProPlus

Last week Microsoft released Office 2016, the most recent edition of their productivity suite including Word, Excel and Outlook. What does this mean for customers who consume Office as part of the Office 365 ProPlus subscription? Why was my Office version upgraded without any warning? Or why am I still on Office 2013?

Update branches

Microsoft introduced ‘update branches’ to release updates to three types of customers:

• Current Branch: Monthly updates with the latest features
• Current Branch for Businesses: Quarterly updates
• Current Branch for Businesses First Release: Test the next current branch before it is released

Read more about release branches in the TechNet Technical Library: Overview of update branches for Office 365 ProPlus or this excellent write-up by Perficient’s Joe Palarchio How Is The Office 2016 Release Relevant To My Office 365 Users?

I want it now!

So if you have Office 365 ProPlus and your Office 365 plan is not Home or Business Premium but for instance Enterprise, you may want to know if you can force an upgrade to Office 2016 on your computer. To achieve that we need to switch out Office install from Current Branch for Businesses to Current Branch. In an enterprise the admins would configure this with a GPO template for Office 2016 or with the Office Deployment Tool when Office is installed on the user’s computer.

The latter is very easy to upgrade Office 365 ProPlus on a single computer to, just follow this procedure.

1. Download the Office Deployment Tool and extract the files to a temporary location, for instance C:\Office.
   
2. Make a backup of the configuration.xml file and edit the contents to something similar to this:
   
   <Configuration>
       <Add SourcePath="c:\Office\" OfficeClientEdition="64" Branch="Current">
           <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
           <Language ID="en-us" />
           </Product>
       </Add>
       <Updates Enabled="TRUE" Branch="Current" />
       <Display Level="Full" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />
   </Configuration>
   
   Note that the value for Branch is set to Current. Other valid values are Business or Validation (First Release).
3. Execute .\setup.exe /download c:\Office\configuration.xml to download the Office files to your local computer, this may take a while.
4. Next start the installation with .\setup.exe /configure c:\Office\configuration.xml

During the installation of Office you will be prompted to save your work and close any opened Office programs.

Enjoy Office 2016!

Using Exchange 2007? Do not upgrade to Outlook 2016

In case you missed it, this week Microsoft released the new Office suite: Office 2016. Of course the latest version includes an updated version of Outlook too. Many people are eager to explore the new version of Office and others found their Office was automatically updated to Office 2016. From an Exchange perspective it’s important to be aware of the fact that Outlook 2016 does not support connections to Exchange 2007.

Customers who upgrade to Outlook 2016 and try to connect to their Exchange 2007 mailbox see this error message presented: The resource that you are trying to use is located on an unsupported version of Microsoft Exchange. Contact your e-mail administrator for assistance

This information can of course be found in the Office System Requirements, but you have to look for it:

Technically speaking there are workarounds available such as have Outlook 2016 access the Exchange 2007 server with the IMAP4 or POP3 protocol, but this of course introduces serious limitations and is not comparable with connecting through a MAPI or Outlook Anywhere connection.

Microsoft released an article which describes this issue and instructs Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home, or Office 365 University users who's Outlook was automatically upgraded to Outlook 2016 to contact Microsoft Support to assist with a roll-back to Office 2013. See Error: Unsupported version of Microsoft Exchange error when you use Outlook 2016 to connect an Exchange 2007 account.

By the way, if your organization is still using Exchange 2007 you may want to look into an upgrade to a more recent Exchange version or Exchange Online. Exchange 2007 is in the Extended Support phase since 2012 and will go out of support in April 2017.