Configuring RPC over HTTP for access to Exchange Server

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) is great for occasional access to e-mail but if you’re using a non-Microsoft browser (as I often do) then it degrades to a rather sorry state. Consequently, for a couple of years now, I’ve been meaning to get RPC over HTTP (aka. Outlook Anywhere) working so that I can use a full Outlook client to access my Exchange Server mailbox when I’m on the road (iPhone access to Exchange Server via IMAP or Outlook Mobile Access from my Nokia 6021 are useful for checking for messages throughout the day but I need to run the full Outlook client to filter out the junk e-mail). After doing most of the preparation work some time ago, I didn’t get around to testing it fully – mostly because a lot of my access is from behind an authenticated proxy (and I’m told that Outlook doesn’t like anything getting in the way).

Tonight, I’m in a hotel, and the iBahn connection has no such restrictions, so I finally got around to testing the connection, using Outlook 2007 to communicate with an Exchange Server 2003 (SP2) server.

Full details may be found in Microsoft knowledge base article 833401 but, as ever, I found Daniel Petri’s articles on the subject more useful:

For me, the process was simplified as I already had OWA working over HTTPS but, as Daniel highlights, Harry Bates’ RPCNoFrontEnd utility can save a lot of time in checking that the registry keys are correctly set for the RPC proxy server ports and the Windows Server 2003 resource kit rpccfg /hd command is useful to confirm their operation:

Using rpccfg to confirm the RPC proxy settings

Secondly, running outlook /rpcdiag gave some useful diagnostic information for confirming that the connection was indeed using HTTPS:

Using the Outlook 2007's RPC diagnostics to check connection status

Ironically, I’ve finally got this working with Exchange Server 2003 just before I’m about to move my mail over to a new server running Exchange Server 2007!

Category management in Outlook 2003 and 2007

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Office 2007 has many improvements over previous versions but most of my colleagues use Office 2003. As I’ve had to install a virtual machine (VM) on my 64-bit desktop in order to run essential 32-bit applications (like our VPN client), I decided to stay as close to the corporate standard as possible and installed Office 2003 in the VM. One unfortunate side effect (apart from the many features that I am missing in Outlook) was the loss of the categories upon which much of my e-mail searching and filtering is based.

Earlier versions of Outlook featured something called the master category list, which could be transferred between PCs using a registry key export and import. Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 dispenses with this approach and instead stores the categories in the master store (mailbox or personal folder).

It seems that I can still search and filter on the categories that my mail was assigned to (they are just not in the master category list) but this also restricted me when adding new mail to categories.

In the end, I decided that reverting to Outlook 2003 was just too painful and I started using Outlook 2007 again to access my corporate e-mail.

The following links may be useful to anyone else who is trying to get to grips with categories in Outlook:

Unconditionally contactable – no thanks.

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This last week has been manic – hence the lack of blog posts… taking a day’s annual leave on Monday and then spending half of it catching up on my administration didn’t bode well, then there were two nights when I was up until 1am trying to write an infrastructure design document and the usual mix of travel, conflicting meeting requirements and trying to get some “real work” done.

“But Mark”, I hear you ask,”surely you use some of the technologies that I see you write about to improve productivity?”

The answer is that I do – I’m using Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007, the Office Communicator client 2007 and Live Meeting 2007 a fair bit – as well as our corporate conferencing service. Soon I’ll be linking all of that in to my voice mail to make use of Exchange Server 2007’s unified messaging capabilities. It’s a really good solution (especially when Communicator reads my calendar or Live Meeting status and sets my presence accordingly). But the technology is no panacea: sometimes something doesn’t work – I spent quite a bit of time this week waiting on a Live Meeting call as Microsoft struggled to get the audio working (they later postponed that particular meeting as even they couldn’t fix it); and other times there is no substitute for getting together in a room – like my main meeting on Friday which necessitated 4 hours travel (which could have been better spent doing something else) but resulted in the production of a migration strategy for a key customer’s messaging infrastructure – something which we had failed to do several times over the phone (and which I doubt even advances in video conferencing would have helped with).

As someone who struggles at times with information overload, and who was described by a friend and ex-colleague as “[sometimes] exhibiting workaholic tendencies”, I need to help myself to become more productive. As I already have a pile of books by the bedside, it’s probably time for an audiobook or two on Getting Things Done (or at least to check out 43 Folders from time to time).

As for unified communications (UC), Dave Bailey wrote an interesting comment for IT Week on the difficulties of getting away from it all – it was only a few days previously that, as I was busily IMing one contact, another team member started e-mailing me on the same subject and I had Outlook “toast” popping up as fast as I could type. Then I spent half of Friday afternoon this week reducing the size of my mailbox so that I could get below the system limits and send mail again (there is one simple answer – the delete key… but that’s not exactly productive either). As my colleague pointed out, it seems that UC really stands for “unconditionally contactable”. No thanks.

Non-existent fax extension causes Outlook error

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My clean installation of Windows Vista and Office 2007 has been presenting me with a strange error on the first time that I reply to an e-mail in Outlook:

Microsoft Office Outlook

The Add-in “FaxExtension” (C:\Windows\System32\fxsext32.dll) cannot be loaded and has been disabled by Outlook. Please contact the Add-in manufacturer for an update. If no update is available, please uninstall the Add-in.

After clicking OK, everything is fine until the next time I open Outlook and reply to a message. It’s all a bit odd, because I don’t have a fax extension installed. Then I found a newsgroup post which commented that sometimes deleting the FaxExtension key from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Extensions will prevent this error from occuring.

I checked the registry and sure enough, there was the key, with a value of 4.0;C:\\Windows\\System32\\fxsext32.dll;1;00000100000000″.

I shut down Outlook, removed the offending key, restarted Outlook and haven’t seen the message since. Guess that’s a bug then.

How to make Outlook the default e-mail program

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Today, I finally got around to rebuilding the notebook PC that I use for e-mail, blogging, web site maintenance and general home IT (I keep all my digital media work on another, desktop, PC). I’m taking this opportunity to try out Mozilla Firefox 1.5 (released yesterday) and to give the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client a go (of course, Internet Explorer is still installed for the badly-written sites that mandate its use, or that don’t recognise Firefox as a valid browser). As a long time (8-year) Outlook user, I needed to import my previous contacts (I took the opportunity to leave behind my e-mail) but this is where I’ve found Thunderbird slightly lacking…

Although Thunderbird does support the import of address book entries from Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express and a variety of file formats there doesn’t seem to be any capacity to filter imports (or to import directly from a personal folder (.PST) file. Instead, the import relies on Outlook being the default e-mail client (or the use of an intermediate file).

The Set Program Access and Defaults feature within Windows XP (mandated as part of one of the many Microsoft antitrust rulings) that is intended to make it easier to specify the default programs for certain operations (such as web browsing, e-mail, media playback, instant messaging and choosing a Java virtual machine); unfortunately it didn’t allow me to specify Microsoft Outlook as the default e-mail client (nor did the option which is supposed to allow this from within Outlook). Strangely, what was needed was to open Internet Explorer and select Internet Options from the Tools menu before using the Internet programs drop-down lists on the Programs page.

Following this, I managed to import my data, but now I notice that my contacts’ addresses have been duplicated in both the home and work address fields. Thunderbird may well turn out to be an excellent e-mail client but its data import capabilities seem to leave a lot to be desired.

What do all those Outlook icons mean?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this morning, one of my colleagues asked me if I knew what a particular icon meant in Outlook. I didn’t, but some googling turned up a full list of icons on Robert Sparnaaij’s How To-Outlook site, which also features other Outlook hints, tips and downloads.

An interesting approach to information management

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Most of us have far more information in our feed readers than we can ever cope with (on top of all the unread e-mail newsletters) but a couple of nights back Microsoft UK’s Paul Flaherty gave out a great tip for searching for information contained in favourite blogs. He suggested adding all your favourite RSS feeds to an Outlook-integrated feed reader and then using Lookout (or any desktop search tool) to search Outlook when trying to find that snippet of information that you’re sure you saw something about somewhere…

Office 2003 SP2 and anti-phishing protection for Outlook 2003 released

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Yesterday, Microsoft released Office 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2).

SP2 is basically a rollup of fixes for Office (full technical details can be found in Microsoft knowledge base article 887616) but it also includes enhancements to Outlook 2003’s Junk E-mail Filter to provide protection against phishing attacks, automatically evaluating any incoming message to see if it might be suspicious, potentially fraudulent, and part of a phishing scheme. For added security, messages that are moved to the Junk E-mail folder will now have their links disabled and message format converted to Plain Text format (any message later moved out of the Junk E-mail folder will have its links enabled and the original message format restored, unless the message is considered by the Junk E-mail Filter to contain suspicious links in which case the links will remain disabled).

In the same manner as the Office 2003 Service Pack 1 release, along with the main service pack, equivalent service packs for OneNote 2003, Project 2003 and Visio 2003 were released.

Further details can be found at Microsoft Office Update.

Sending SMS messages from within Outlook

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of months back, my colleague James Simmonds wrote about a free Microsoft Office SMS Add-in (MOSA) which allows the sending (but not receipt) of text messages from within the Outlook 2003 client (in this context, SMS is Short Message Service – not Systems Management Server). I finally downloaded MOSA this afternoon and it looks good.

MOSA can only send messages using a GSM mobile handset that supports the Protocol Description Unit (PDU) standard. Initially, I attempted to send a message using a standard modem (without success – generating a “the modem does not support messages in PDU format” message) but once I paired my notebook PC with a Nokia 6310i via Bluetooth, everything jumped into life.

For anyone wondering (as I was), what exactly the PDU format is, I found some further information about SMS and the PDU format as well as a PDU string analyser and converter.

Battle spammers with Outlook’s tracking options

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 20 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I just came across a top tip on the Microsoft website to stop spammers from verifying your e-mail address using a read/delivery receipt.

Basically, it involves enabling the tracking option to “ask me before sending a response”. That way you can tell when someone has attempted to validate your e-mail address – I had thought that sending a fake non-delivery report (NDR) would be enough but it seems without this setting I could also have been sending a read receipt without realising it when I deleted the spam.