Difference between Offline and Disconnected

[jeffg60nj]

We are currently in the process of moving from a local exchange 5.5 to an
outsourced Hosted Exchange 2003 service using RPC over HTTP.

We've noticed the following behaviour (all clients using outlook 2003).

When configured for the exchange 2003 server using RPC over HTTP the
following occurs:

When the client is in a disconected state i get errors "trying to connect to
the exchange server" when:

trying a reply to all
creating a new calendar item
creating a new contact.

However reply, forward and new work fine.

If I click to offline mode, all the above works.

When configured for my exchange 5.5 server, everything works in disconnected
mode.

To me this behaviour seems like a bug as we are running in cached exchange
mode and from my understanding the only difference between disconnected and
offline is that in "disconnected" the client will periodically try to
reconnect to the server.

I am correct or am I missing something. Having the users set and clear
offline mode sort of defeats the purpose of Cached Exchange mode.

Thanks

 

[jeffg60nj]

Well finally after much internet searching decided to use one of our cases
with MS. To my surprise, after a bit of testing I was finally informed that
this is a bug in Outlook 2003 when using RPC/HTTP. MS is addressing this in
Outlook 2003.. Go figure, time to layout more money to fix their bug.

Well at least I wasn't charged for the case...