outlook 2007 remains in a disconnected state

[kapibarra]

Hello. I have users who connect to outlook on our vpn over a sprint
mobile broadband connection. It works fine with OL2002, but for some
reason, users of OL2007 start up and remain in a disconnected state
(even though we have configured OL2007 to prompt the user to "connect or
work offline" when it first starts), it remains disconnected even though
they hit connect when prompted. Hitting send/receive or F9 just results
in it giving a message saying it is not connected. I can ping the
exchange 2007 server over the connection. All of our other apps that
connect over the vpn work fine, except OL2007. Is there anyway to try
and make OL2007 connect?

Thanks.

 

[Ben M. Schorr - MVP (OneNote)]

Is it being blocked by your firewall? What firewall are you using on
the machine? Can you add an exception for Outlook?

--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
http://www.officeforlawyers.com
Author - The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/5m3f5q

 

[kapibarra]

Is it being blocked by your firewall? What firewall are you using on
the machine? Can you add an exception for Outlook?

--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
http://www.officeforlawyers.com
Author - The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/5m3f5q

Hi Ben and thanks for the response. I temporarily disabled the windows
firewall (that's what we use) and still had the same result. I didn't
think it would fix the problem because it's on XPSP2 which means that it
only blocks incoming not outgoing traffic. Any other suggestions welcome.

 

[slyruss]

I'm having this same issue, except my users are on an internal network. The
second time this happened was today. I fixed the first one with an Office
2007 uninstall/reinstall, but if you have a lot of machines that's not going
to be something you want to do. I'm running Exchange 2003 with the latest
Microsoft updates, and the two users with problems have had Office 2007 Std
running on XP Pro. I've never seen this problem in Outlook 2003, and now
we've had it twice in a week in Outlook 2007

 

[slyruss]

I also should've stated that creating a new profile on the machine doesn't
help. It still prompts for credentials but won't authenticate. Maybe it's a
different problem than you're having, but my users are definitely stuck on
"Disconnected" and it appears to be something to do with the Outlook settings
since they could authenticate fine over the network prior without the need
for any username/password entry.

 

[slyruss]

Well, I tracked back my problem to user error. Laptops and dockings stations
causing DNS problems. The problem was that they were popping out the laptops
without choosing to disconnect them, which left the computer thinking the LAN
connection was how it should be connecting to the Exchange server, even
though that wasn't connected. I had to disable the LAN connection, run
ipconfig /flushdns, then re-enable the LAN, which then allowed them to
connect via wireless. I'd look into having your clients try flushing their
DNS and connecting to Outlook aftewards. It might be a workaround for now and
then hope MS releases some type of fix for Outlook when you change network
connection interfaces.