Outlook 2016 with Exchange 2007

By | 12 Dec 2016

In Outlook 2016, you can’t setup an account from an Exchange 2007 server without having autodiscover setup correctly. The Manual Setup only offers “Exchange ActiveSync” which doesn’t work with the 2007 Exchange. (The working method is named “Microsoft Exchange”.)

Usually, for an email address account@example.org, Outlook 2016 will look for https://autodiscover.example.org/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml. If that DNS entry isn’t configured or there’s no autodiscover.xml at that address, the account setup in Outlook will fail.

However, there are a few ways to override where Outlook is looking for that XML. The probably easiest one is by adding a registry key to point to a local file containing the actual path to the desired autodiscover.xml.

So, let’s say, you can reach OWA via https://mail.example.org/owa/, then the autodiscover.xml is https://mail.example.org/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml.

And you’re trying to add an email address john@company.com which is managed by that Exchange 2007 (and you can login to OWA just fine).

  1. Create a file C:\autodiscover.xml with the following contents:
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
    <Autodiscover xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/responseschema/2006">
    <Response xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/outlook/responseschema/2006a">
    <Account>
    <AccountType>email</AccountType>
    <Action>redirectUrl</Action>
    <RedirectUrl>https://mail.example.org/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml</RedirectUrl>
    </Account>
    </Response>
    </Autodiscover>
  2. Open regedit and navigate to the path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\AutoDiscover
  3. Add a new String (REG_SZ), name it company.com (the part after the @ in your mail address) and assign the value C:\autodiscover.xml to it.
  4. Done. Now open Outlook 2016 and add your account. It should work now.

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