Autodiscover and Entourage 12.1.5 vs Entourage for EWS Beta 2

[JG_Giant]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel
Email Client: Exchange

I am an Exchange administrator searching for the options we have for migrating Mac users mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. I've spent the last couple days fighting autodiscover trying to get it to work on Entourage 2008. Finally it is working well. This works great for setting up a new email account within Entourage. The issue I have is when Entourage is configured to connect to an Exchange 2003 mailbox, and the mailbox is moved to an Exchange 2007 server, Entourage 12.1.5 does not automatically detect this change and modify the mailbox settings it is using to reflect the new paths to the servers.

My questions are as follows:

1. Is there a way to force Entourage 12.1.5 to "rediscover" its mailbox settings using the autodiscover service without forcing the users to blow out their mail settings? Possibly a script or something an admin can do on the back end? It does not seem to run at configured intervals as it is designed to do. I suspect I already know the answer to this question.

2. The announcement for the beta states:
Improved Autodiscover. In Entourage for Exchange Web Services Beta, the Autodiscover service keeps user account settings up-to-date after the account setup.
• It runs in the background every time that you start Entourage.
• It also runs at a server-defined interval, typically every hour, to make sure that the Exchange Server settings are always kept up-to-date

Does this mean that 12.1.5 does not run autodiscover in the background, nor at Entourage startup? I guess I am just looking for more clarification on exactly how autodiscover will work both on 12.1.5 and the new beta as documentation on these features are severely lacking.

 

[William Smith [MVP]]

1. Is there a way to force Entourage 12.1.5 to "rediscover" its
mailbox settings using the autodiscover service without forcing the
users to blow out their mail settings? Possibly a script or something
an admin can do on the back end? It does not seem to run at
configured intervals as it is designed to do. I suspect I already
know the answer to this question.

A script can be used to change mail server settings and this will not
cause Entourage 2008 to lose its cached Exchange information. You can
take this one that I wrote for setting up an Exchange account and modify
it for your needs:

"Entourage Exchange Setup 3.0"
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/exchange/exchangesetupv3.html>

You'll still have to instruct users to run the script manually.

2. The announcement for the beta states: Improved Autodiscover. In
Entourage for Exchange Web Services Beta, the Autodiscover service
keeps user account settings up-to-date after the account setup. • It
runs in the background every time that you start Entourage. • It also
runs at a server-defined interval, typically every hour, to make sure
that the Exchange Server settings are always kept up-to-date

Does this mean that 12.1.5 does not run autodiscover in the
background, nor at Entourage startup? I guess I am just looking for
more clarification on exactly how autodiscover will work both on
12.1.5 and the new beta as documentation on these features are
severely lacking.

It's saying just the opposite. Entourage runs its Autodiscover detection
at startup of the application and about every hour.

Autodiscover in Entourage 2008 EWS is a feature of the Exchange Web
Services protocol found only in Exchange Server 2007. It is not the same
"auto discover" used in Entourage 2004 with Exchange Server 2003. While
they both accomplish the same thing, they do it completely differently.

Hope this helps!

--

bill

Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>
YouTalk <http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/youtalk>
Twitter: follow <http://twitter.com/meck>

 

[JG_Giant]

Thanks for the prompt response Bill. Let me clarify my situation a little bit and maybe the issues I am facing will become a little more clear. I run a Windows AD environment. We use Exchange as our mail system in a mixed Exchange 2003 - 2007 environment. We are currently in the process of moving users mailboxes over to Exchange 2007. I have approximately 400 Mac users that will need to be moved over to the Exchange 2007 servers. Their mailboxes will reside on one of 4 clustered mailbox servers, and will be spread out across the servers to distribute the load. For the most part these users are using Entourage 12.1.5. I am trying to make this process as seamless for the end user as possible. The way autodiscover (When I refer to autodiscover, I only refer to the Microsoft service Autodiscover designed to automatically serve up mailbox confiugration settings for a particular mailbox) is designed, it can be used to initially configure the mailbox, but can also keep a users configuration up to date by running in the background and modifying the users settings if it detects a change on the Exchange side of things. I'm pretty clear on how it will work in the Beta 13.0.0 (It actually works...), my questions are more geared towards the current (production) version of Entourage 2008, 12.1.5. Is it possible to rerun the autodiscover process on 12.1.5 so that the client automatically detects its settings and updates its software accordingly? I don't mind being forced to use a script to run this process as I do not have to specify a mailbox server, LDAP server, etc manually each time the script is run; instead these settings are detected by the autodiscover process and updated. If I am forced to use a script to manually set each setting on the client, then I have to know the exchange settings for each user that will run the script. For 400 different users, this makes no sense.

So to sum up, is there a script, command, etc on the Mac that I can run to force autodiscover (the Microsoft service) to run again on a machine that already is configured for email access and update its settings automatically, NOT to manually set the mailbox settings. This "resolution" cannot contain anything specific to either the Exchange server, or the users mailbox itself. It will need to be as generic as possible to allow it to run on 400 machines without any modifications.

Thanks,
Jon