Troubleshooting Outlook Connectivity

 

 

 

Microsoft have released an excellent utility called the Outlook Connectivity Analyzer which you can download HERE
________________________________________________________________________________

Overview

The Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool 2.0 provides a detailed report of your current Outlook profile and mailbox. This report includes many parameters about your profile, and it highlights any known problems that are found in your profile or mailbox. For any problems that are listed in the report, you are provided a link to a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article that describes a possible fix for the problem. If you are a Help Desk professional, you can also export the report to a file. Then, the report can be viewed in the Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool on another client computer where the tool is installed. The Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool 2.0 also includes a command-line version that can be used to collect an OCAT scan without user intervention.
________________________________________________________________________________

This tool can be used via command line without user intervention. Now this is really useful. Some users are too busy for the IT guy to run a report on their pc and use up their valuable time.

The tool can be used for mailboxes connected to Exchange on-premise or Office365.

 

A user can send you the xml file which was output from their own report which can then be viewed by importing into your own local copy of this tool.


A lot of the times Outlook Add-Ins can cause problems and for an engineer that is supporting Exchange on a regular basis it becomes easy to spot the culprit add in.

 

It also picks up hotfixes which are not available in Windows update , like this one KB2598374 which fixes quite a few issues.