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Outlook 2003 clients in multiple sites could not connect to their Exchange servers after central Exchange Server turned off

Hi. We are running a distributed Exchange 2003 SP1 environment in mixed mode. We recently turned off an Exchange 2003 server and brought it to our site for decommissioning. While Exchange was turned off, our Outlook 2003 clients in multiple sites could not connect and the Exchange Server Settings window in Outlook will come up. If you type in any valid Exchange server, the client will connect OK. Of course we do not want our users to use this procedure, so the question is: how can we instruct Outlook clients to automatically connect to their home Exchange servers so we can decommision the server ? After doing some investigations, I learned that this server was part of the initial Office rollout a couple of years back where all clients were (and still are) pointing to. I checked the local Windows registry on XP clients and the Exchange server is used in at least tree keys. Is there a method of solving this issue, make it transparent to users ? One suggestion was to create an alias in DNS so for server X you create an alias pointing to a valid Exchange server Y, but would be interested in resolving the issue via Exchange or AD, not using DNS.

Any help is appreciated.
Thx
SM

Sembee

Any reason why you aren't on Exchange 2003 SP2? Unrelated, but considering that SP2 has been around for almost 18 months I find it most puzzling that people aren't using it, particularly in the current security environment.

Do you know how Outlook was deployed originally? Was a custom installation set used, possibly with a configuration file? You can deploy a replacement Outlook configuration file. The instructions are on the Office Resource Kit web site.

Another option would be to use a netbios alias on an existing server. That would take the original server's name.

I don't think this is either an AD or Exchange issue - it is down to how Outlook was deployed.

Simon.

aspenit

ASKER

Hi. Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately we are running a distributed environment and it is time consuming to apply SP2 to all Exchanges boxes (and we have a lot of them). We will actually consolidate into central servers soon.

Apparently Outlook was (and is) part of an image along with XP Pro so every client will point to same Exchange server.

Again what we want to achieve is point all Outlook clients to other valid Exchange server(s) so we can decommision the one they are currently pointing to. This will need to be done again when consolidating into a couple of central Exchange servers later, so solution must be a reliable long term solution, transparent to our users with minimal impact and effort. Do you have the MS link for "replacement Outlook configuration file".

Thx
SM

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Sembee

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