Hello fellow IT Admins/Managers/Support Engineers
Over the past few months, I've been having nothing but problems with Outlook/Exchange Online and it all started when our organisation was upgraded to Wave 15. Contacting Microsoft support seems to have been a waste of time in most instances and left me feeling unsatisfied. I've done the same silly Outlook troubleshooting procedure (repair profile, recreate profile, etc.). I've ran OffCAT and I keep installing hotfixes on a regular basis (the ones that for some reason insist on emailing you the download link). All this seems to be doing nothing to resolve the ongoing issues we have.
The result is that I'm not satisfied, my management is not satisfied and the directors in the organisation are less than pleased with our department's performance since we've moved to Office 365 (actually since it's gone to Wave 15). We're considering moving away from Office 365 as we just don't have enough time to try to get Outlook clients to work seamlessly. We're spending twice as much time on average on talking to users and coming up with workarounds than we did on administering our in-house Exchange system before the migration.
What I would like to do, is to have a big thread with all the Outlook/Exchange issues aggregated in one place, to see what other issues we can expect and how widespread the issues we have are.
To be totally honest, I'm frustrated.
I would therefore very much appreciate if everyone could list the issues they're experiencing with their Office 365 Outlook/Exchange solution. Just for transparency and visibility.
As I have mentioned above, our issues started with the Wave 15 upgrade (2013).
Here's what we have problems with:
- Outlook is not responding for 2-10 minutes on startup. This happens even if Outlook is configured to work in Offline mode or is connecting to brand new mailbox created just for testing. The issue affects every user in our organisation and happens on variety of machines in and out of office. It also happens on Outlook clients installed on non domain joined machines. Again, started with Wave 15.
- Random disconnects throughout the day. The Outlook client disconnects and remains disconnected or in "Trying to connect" state. This issue will resolve itself and lasts between 5-15 minutes most of the time.
- Creating and configuring a new profile, using Autodiscover, takes 45 minutes. This one is recent (last 2 days). It takes absolutely forever to configure new Outlook profile. During the wait, the Outlook is "Not responding". This issue appear to affect only some of the users. Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer passes all test in green. In Outlook connection status, the average response times are > 2000.
- Assigning Full Access permissions to mailbox with AutoMapping enabled doesn't work. The permissions have to be assigned in Powershell with -Automapping:$false parameter added as otherwise the will not work in Outlook.
- Outlook crashes on occasions, corrupting OST files and requiring the profile to be recreated. This seems to happen to users who have access to other people's mailboxes (with Download Shared Folders enabled) if the OST file grows over 10GB.
Please post yours!
Rules:
1. If you're a Microsoft employee (with "- MSFT" after your name), please DO NOT post in this thread at all! I don't want to know what you think. I'm fed up with all the damage control coming from Microsoft forum drones.
2. Don't ask for solutions in this thread. Just list your problems.
3. Feel free to post solutions to other people' problems (unless you're a MS employee, in which case DO NOT).
I would appreciate if forum moderators could kindly leave this thread alone, for us - people that actually have to deal with the fallout of all these issues.
Thank you.