Exchange autodiscover how does it work

Except for the annoyance of the user and the helpdesk, think about the compliance impact of this change. Personally, I am currently working with a customer who is in a Proof of Concept with Office and hitting the authentication pop-ups. Luckily, I knew that this behavior has changed recently, but my colleagues did not know and were looking for a cause for a couple of days. Another nasty example is when you are testing Office next to your existing on-premises Exchange environment.

Imagine a scenario where Outlook presents an authentication pop-up, and the user enters his credentials. Next Outlook unexpectedly connects to a test Mailbox in Office instead of their on-premises Exchange mailbox. Again, besides the annoyance, think about possible legal implications when this happens. And the financial cost to fix this when it happens to several users and helpdesk staff needs days to get everything back to its original state.

One last example pertains to organizations that offer local hosted Exchange solutions. Suddenly, without anyone knowing, this behavior changes and users are presented a pop-up without the possibility to logon anywhere. This works fine for domain joined clients or when using SSCM managed clients, but Intune managed client do not have this functionality to my knowledge and for non-domain joined clients this key should be added manually through the use of a.

Needless to say that this change was badly received by IT Admins and caused a lot of resistance. One customer submitted an idea on UserVoice to change this behavior, but the request was not fulfilled and Microsoft will continue to optimize for Office This in turn caused more frustration for customers and MVPs.

Save the file and double click it to import it into the Registry. Step 4: Open Outlook and configure your account Now open Outlook and add your account via Auto Account Setup by only supplying your name, email address and password.

AutoConfiguration Autodiscover redirect prompt. Note: If you can connect successfully now, it may still stop functioning in the future when your Exchange administrator makes an infrastructural change that affects your mailbox. Location of the hidden cached Autodiscover. XML file.

Implementing one of the following solutions is preferred and recommended over implementing any of the end-user level methods. End-users can then configure their account in Outlook simply by providing things they know and can remember;.

You can check your Outlook Connectivity and Autodiscover configuration settings for your Exchange environment by using the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer. Note: The only downside of the methods discussed below is that your users will get a redirect warning and may have to supply their credentials twice depending on your firewall settings but they only have to do this once and can set it to never bother them again.

This does not apply when you follow the Preferred Architecture with a dedicated autodiscover subdomain but this requires more elaborate reconfiguration and a new certificate. If not, you may still need to make a firewall exception. When it is successful, also do the Outlook Connectivity test. When that fails, you may need to configure the proper external URLs in Exchange. Note that in the later versions of Exchange , only two namespaces — IP and transport namespace, are required.

In short, autodiscover is a useful feature and also a must-have one in the latest Exchange versions. It is also useful because all configurations are handled automatically without manual intervention, thereby saving time and effort. Lavanya Rathnam is a professional writer of tech and financial blogs. Creative thinker, out of the boxer, content builder and tenacious researcher who specializes in explaining complex ideas to different audiences.

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Lavanya Rathnam February 11, Post Views: 12, This article discusses the Autodiscover feature introduced in Exchange Server It has become an essential and feature and continues to be a part of even the latest Exchange versions like Readers will understand the functions and importance of the Autodiscover service by going through this article.

The Autodiscover feature is available for the users of Exchange and later versions. It is a service that helps to configure user mailboxes automatically.