Hey all, I have two problems with two employees. They both are connecting by vpn with the ATT Global network client from their homes. These Both employees are using outlook 2000. They are both behind personal routers. They can both browse the Internet and intranet web pages with no problems. One of the employees can connect with no problem but after ten minutes only her outlook stops responding. The other, her exchange server will no respond. She is able to ping it successfully. Created several new profiles have no effect or even simply trying a check name. Any help on these two problems?
out of interest, can they log on to the webmail side of things (assuming you have webmail switched on on your exchange server) offline address book was another culprit we had to switch off on some of our VPN employees because it was crashing outlook. can't think of anything else right now, but i assume also that you have many more people connected fine with no issues? other things to try perhaps would be running in exchange cache mode, or switching it off if its already enabled, and perhaps reconnecting to the vpn client (is it contivity (novell)?)
Actually thats a good idea. They are able to connect via the web mail. I'll try disabling it. Do you know how to disable it?
From: http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Configuring_and_Using_OWA_in_Exchange_2000_Server.html slightly different for exchange 2003, but you get the gist. This will keep OWA enabled for everyone else for testing, so as not to interrupt their experience. Disabling Outlook Web Access for a specific user As I mentioned previously, OWA is enabled by default for all Exchange users. You can, however, disable OWA for a specific user if you need to. In this way, other users can still use OWA unaffected. To disable OWA for a specific user, follow the steps outlined below: 1. Open Active Directory Users and Computers. 2. If not already select, enable Advanced Features by clicking View | Advanced Features. 3. Expand the nodes until you have located the user of concern. 4. Right-click the user and select Properties. 5. Switch to the Exchange Advanced tab and click the Protocol Settings button. 6. From the Protocols page, click HTTP. 7. From the HTTP Protocols Detail page, deselect the Enable for mailbox setting, as shown in Figure 7. 8. Close out all properties pages and the Active Directory Users and Computers console.
as with all these things, the trick is to try and isolate the problem. switch things off one by one, until it doesnt work, and then bingo, you have your culprit. Exchange can be a pain though, and dealing with users through their own routers and home PCs can be an even bigger pain. just make sure they aren't running you around, when you say "does the web work" make sure they havent just clicked on IE, seen their homepage (most likely cached) and said "yes its fine" get them to authenticate on something (Facebook, ebay, myspaz, webmail etc), and click though a few pages before believing them. often things like this can boil down to DNS settings or incorrectly configured proxies that allow some things but fail on others. very hard to pin down.
Ugh! Still not resolved. Is there a way that maybe thier personal routers might be blocking the port for the outlook exchange server?
