If Outlook opens without a problem, we will have to troubleshoot the Outlook database. To do this, follow these steps: Quit all applications. On the Go menu, click Home. Open Documents, and then open Microsoft User Data. Drag Office 2011 Identities to the desktop. Open Outlook. If the problem is resolved, the issue is related to the Outlook database.
. The Outlook for Mac will automatically create and assign categories if you have your Address Book contacts in groups.
To avoid notes and photos from backing up in the VCF file, deselect the 'Export notes in vCards' and 'Export photos in vCards' options from Contacts Preferences vCard. If in Step 2, you choose the File Export Contacts Archive option, the contacts will be exported as an ABBU file instead of VCF. The ABBU format is great for importing the contacts back into a macOS application but not so great for using the address book with non-Mac programs or online email services.
A colleague of mine was setting up a customer for Exchange 2010. Everything was set up like it should be, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 clients worked like a charm. This customer also has a few Macs running Office 2011, where Outlook unfortunately refused to do anything (literally). When he put in the information for the Exchange server, nothing happened. It would just sit at an empty mailbox, no connection errors, no authentication errors, nothing.
Let me be honest and say that at my company, we’re not exactly good when it comes to Macs, we’re actually quite horrible. Anyways, we struggled a long time as we kept getting no feedback on the process from the Mac. The solution? Keep reading! The solution When we finally found the solution, it was a fairly basic one. Outlook 2011 doesn’t use MAPI, it relies solely on EWS (Exchange Web Services). When we tried to browse via a browser on the Mac, it wouldn’t prompt for any credentials, just show a blank page, where a Windows computer would actually show something useful.
Then we checked the authentication allowed for EWS in IIS. It was set to allow Anonymous Authentication (this is required by the Exchange server) and Windows Authentication. Obviously you need to authenticate to pull anything useful out of this service, and, for perhaps pretty obvious reasons, the Mac wasn’t using Windows Authentication. We enabled Basic Authentication and it started working immediately on the Mac. If you want to make sure it’s updated fast, do a iisreset from a command line.
These images should tell you everything. Thank you for this potentially very illuminating posting. I have a question, however. I thought that your discoveries above provided a solution for the problem I’ve been having here at work, which is exactly as you described above. Now, the IT department here hasn’t tried implementing your fix yet. This is for a variety of reasons: 1) I am the only Mac guy in-house, and a guinea pig to see if we can convert our design department to Mac. Exchange is the last major bugaboo.
2) They hate dealing with Macs, so they leave me pretty much unsupported to deal with any and all issues by myself. 3) There might be security issues in enabling the Basic Authentication (or so they claim), which I doubt, but might be the case – do you know? But the big issue is that, while I am the only Mac user on-site, around 10% of the company uses Macs at home. Since the change to Exchange Server 2010, none of us can get to our Windows machines at work.
This seems unrelated, but it’s a clear correlation, so that’s our only obvious connection now. We all connect via VPN (Cisco client), and we can all still connect to the VPN fine. However, it’s Remote Desktop Connection that no longer lets us access our machines.
Now, when we try to log in we get the alert: “Remote Desktop Connection cannot verify the identity of the computer that you want to connect to.” We’ve verified that the names of the machines are correct, but none of us can get in. My recent hunch is that perhaps it has something to do with the issue you discovered above, though that seems far-fetched. However, I can’t get the IT department to enable Basic Authentication because they think it can’t be related (because the VPN is working so it must Authenticate fine), and because it might pose a security risk. Do you have any insights, words of advice, or things to try for this situation? When it was just me an Office 2011 struggling, it wasn’t so much of an issue. But a tenth of our company can now not work from home, which is a big problem for some. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance, Matt Laurence. Hi Matt, Lets start with the security question. Basic Authentication is pretty much what it sounds like, pretty basic. It sends username and password in clear text across the network, which is, of course, horrible unsafe by default.
Exchange 2010 however, works over an encrypted channel (HTTPS), which encrypts all the traffic, making it significant more safe. Because of this, the basic authentication “hand-shake” never leaves your computer unencrypted, and an unwanted person can’t simply sniff it on the network, not without breaking the encryption, in which case your user login is probably the last thing you want to worry about.
If the encryption layer is breached, yes, your username and password is there for the hacker to see, I can respect that point of view, but how many layers of security do you need? If you authenticate remotely or from a non-domain computer (or using an IP address instead of hostname as the server), Windows Authentication falls back to NTLM, and how safe is that really? Let me give you an example of HTTPS and Basic Authentication.
You probably have some sort of banking solution over the internet, your company probably has some sort of banking solution over the internet. I think we can agree, that this kind of information, gets close to being the absolutely most confidential information, which of course needs the best kind of protection. You can probably guess where this is going. Yes, banks rely on the HTTPS channel to stay secure, if it wasn’t there, username/password, account information, transfers and so forth would be sent in clear text.
Which encryption is deemed good enough for the banks? The same encryption Exchange 2010 uses to encrypt its traffic (including Basic Authentication). Some banks offer 2 or even 3-factor authentication (tokens with numbers generated every minute and so), but this is not done because the HTTPS channel is considered unsafe, no, this is done because a users computer might be infected with a keylogger, sending the exact key-sequence used for logging in.
In this case, it doesn’t matter if you use basic, NTLM, kerberos, a thousand encrypted VPN tunnels or a quadrumtanqualizer (yes, I made that word up for added effect). Even using 2 and 3-factor authentication, it still relies on the HTTPS layer to keep the traffic secure, encrypting token information and such, as this would still be possible to sniff on the network otherwise. That part got somewhat long, but security is always a delicate matter. Conclusion is, if it’s good enough for the banks, perhaps it’s good enough for your company? Now, for the remote desktop part. I have to agree with your IT department, simply implementing Exchange 2010 shouldn’t affect your remote desktop experience.
The warning you get, is normal when connecting to a Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 computer, as most use the default self-signed certificate for this, and because the certificate is not trusted, the identity can’t be verified (I’m skipping over this a bit, it’s pretty complicated). You should be able to “accept” the above warning, and continue the login process, do you get any additional error messages? Did you have to accpet this warning before the problem started as well? Except this, this sounds to only happen with Mac clients, so make sure you’re using the newest RDP client from Microsoft for it (RDP for Mac 2.1 ). This should be included in Office 2011, so you probably already have it. Alternatively, truth is that Microsfts RDP client for Mac is at times not that great. To be honest, it can be horrible.
There is an open-source project called CoRD, which at times has proven to be more reliable for some users. It can be found here:. This might have some trouble connecting to a TS Gateway server, but I’m guessing you’re not using one. I hope the above is to some use, and just let me know if you have any further questions. THANK you for your very detailed reply.
I will only have the chance to check some of this stuff tomorrow when I work from home but check it I will. As to the RDC part of this, no, I’m not given any other error messages that I can OK or accept – it just fails with that error and recommends I try either reconnecting or contacting the administrator. The admin doesn’t know what’s going on, so I’m on my own to help the other people in the same boat. I will make sure RDC is current, and then I’ll try CoRD, if all else fails.
But I feel like this must be something on the server end that I can’t access, and it was fine before the Exchange server upgrade. Any further insights you might have would be very useful – thanks again for all your help. Ok, I am working from home and attempted several things to improve the RDC situation.
First, I checked into all the related issues on the Win7 end to make sure the Firewall was allowing it, services started, etc. A couple of things were disabled by default, so I enabled them. On the Mac end, I updated to RDC 2.1 (I was on 2.0.1, and the update option in the program didn’t indicate there was anything to update to! So I did it manually). Then I checked all my network and domain settings, made sure everything was ship-shape and BANG – I was in. I don’t know which factors were blocking it, but I’ve sent out a report to everyone with steps to take.
This being said, I still don’t have a solution for the Office 2011 Mac not being able to hit Exchange 2010 issue, but I’ll see if I can convince them to try the Authentication thing. Thanks again! Everything is fine, except the categories – do you have any ideas on that? On the local computer, the user has about 100 categories in outlook 2011 for mac – the new ones are not syncing. In entourage 2008, they had about 50, which synced with the exchange server just fine. They have a delegate, who can see the categories in entourage 2008 (that were made in entourage 2008) but none of the categories in outlook 2011.
Any help would be appreciated – i’m looking around and can’t find any answers to this delegate-category-outlook issue.: thanks! We have just had a server upgrade to sbs 2008 and pretty much everything is fine, all of our windows based users (primarily Win7 w. Office 2010) are having a whale of a time however, our two external Mac users are having a few issues. One has Outlook 2011 that works fine within our domain. I set up a VPN for when she’s out of the office and I’ve tested it on an external connection and Outlook sends and receives.
However, when she’s at home although the VPN says it’s connected (and I can confim a connection has been made to the server in RRA), Outlook will not syncin fact it doesn’t do anything and I get no errors. I’ve checked the server settings and basic authentification is enabled. What foxes me is that we had it workingany ideas? I don’t have any good suggestions. Outlook 2011 seems to just “go blank” when something is not working, which makes it fairly hard to troubleshoot. Instead, I’ll list what I find are the most common issues when dealing with VPN. DNS not working properly.
Can you resolve names on the domain the Exchange server is located on? For example, you should be able to resolve the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the exchange server. Another way to test, is to try the URL i typed in the article,. If you can’t get to the site at all, it’s most likely a VPN/network related problem. If you get prompted for credentials, and you can type them in and get some response from the site (probably some error response), it should be fine. NetBIOS resolution, although this is not as important for Exchange 2007, make sure you can ping the NetBIOS name of the Exchange server, then that won’t stop it from working. For example, if the FQDN of the Exchange server is “exchange.domain.local”, the NetBIOS name is most likely “exchange”.
Make sure you can contact the Exchange CAS server on port 443, if you can’t, nothing else matters. One way to try, is to simply make a telnet connection to the server, for example, in a command prompt type: telnet exchange.domain.local 443 If you have any questions, feel free to ask them. In searching for a solution to frequent crashes with Outlook (Office 2011) on my MacBook Pro running 10.7.1 and connecting to an NHS Exchange server I discovered on the Console application that I am getting thousands of the following comments; 09:30:18.972 Microsoft Outlook: CFURLCreateWithString was passed this invalid URL string: ‘/EWS/exchange.asmx’ (a file system path instead of an URL string). The URL created will not work with most file URL functions. CFURLCreateWithFileSystemPath or CFURLCreateWithFileSystemPathRelativeToBase should be used instead. I would be most grateful if someone could shed some light on this. Should I be concerned, can I correct things, might it be the reason for the application being unstable?
We are having an major issue that certificates can be used for signing or encryption when mail is going from Outlook 2011 to Outlook 2010. Messages coming from Outlook 2010 that are signed with valid certificates get errors and warnings (if viewed in Outlook 2010 no errors), encrypted messages back and forth do not work, from the Outlook 2011 side, you get errors that there is no certificates or Digital name can’t be found.
We are finding a lot of issues as MACs are being integrated into the environment. Thanks for this solution. Though my problem wasn’t exactly the same, your solution pointed my nose to the issue and it is now resolved. I’m at a fairly large company and we run a mixed environment (PC/Mac/Linux). Its been a long time in the works, but we finally decided to move from Exchange 2003 to 2010. I has a consultant doing most of the work and when he left everything was working perfectlyor so we thought.
77k accounts (Windows based Outlook) were migrated to the new environment and everything ran beautifully. My final task was to get the 2500 Apple users into Exchange 2010 so they could use the native 2011 client and stop fussing with Entourage. 150 were moved one night and all hell broke loose. All of them were prompting the client for their sign-on credentials. This would happen to each client 12-20 times a day. For a week I have been pulling my hair out then I finally formulated my Google search in such a way that I landed here.
Read your solution about the basic authentication and decided to give it a check. We have several IIS servers here, but on the second one I found the value set to false. Set it true and ran the iisreset and instantly became a hero.
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