Strange issue with Entourage 2008, Exchange 2007, Outlook 2007, and email address autogeneration   

At my office we work with an Exchange 2007 environment connecting to
Office 2007/2008 clients, and we've been having strange issues as of
late. We just recently enabled automatic email address creation
(firstname.lastname@domain format) and it's caused odd issues with our
Entourage clients and calendar sharing.

Before, we used <logonname>@domain format addresses and everything was
fine - Mac and PC users could see calendars, sharing worked fine, etc
etc. After the change, Mac users have difficulty opening shared
calendars. Because Entourage tries to open the calendar with
usernames, it tries to look for the calendar as firstname.lastname on
the server and not username. Unless you tell it to open the calendar
specifically by looking for the username, it fails to open.
Additionally, if the outgoing email address is set to be
firstname.lastname@domain instead of logonname@domain users will be
unable to send mail. However, logonname still works (even though it
shouldn't because it's no longer a valid outbound address, inbound
only) and is autocorrected when passing through the Exchange server.

Finally, PC users cannot see the Mac user's calendars when the PCs are
in Cached mode. When operating in Online mode, calendars work normally
(as far as the PC is concerned). There are no problems opening PC
users' calendars in either cached or online.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
----
Jack Kramer
Computer Systems Specialist
University Relations, Michigan State University

date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:14:19 -0700 (PDT)   author:   unknown

Re: Strange issue with Entourage 2008, Exchange 2007, Outlook 2007, and email address autogeneration   

tarimko@gmail.com wrote:

> Before, we used <logonname>@domain format addresses and everything was
> fine - Mac and PC users could see calendars, sharing worked fine, etc
> etc. After the change, Mac users have difficulty opening shared
> calendars. Because Entourage tries to open the calendar with
> usernames, it tries to look for the calendar as firstname.lastname on
> the server and not username. Unless you tell it to open the calendar
> specifically by looking for the username, it fails to open.
> Additionally, if the outgoing email address is set to be
> firstname.lastname@domain instead of logonname@domain users will be
> unable to send mail. However, logonname still works (even though it
> shouldn't because it's no longer a valid outbound address, inbound
> only) and is autocorrected when passing through the Exchange server.

Hi Jack!

I think you could use some Exchange expertise on this in addition to 
Entourage. Definitely post your question to the 
microsoft.public.exchange.admin newsgroup too.

I'm going to suspect this has something to do with your default SMTP 
addresses for your accounts. Having the wrong address set can cause 
problems like this. Entourage, from my understanding, uses only the 
default SMTP address for many things. This may be one of them.

-- 

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>
YouTalk <http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/youtalk>

date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:50:10 -0500   author:   William Smith