Entourage (Office 2004) suddenly won't connect

[tnseller]

I hadn't used my Mac Powerbook Pismo on the office network for over
two weeks. It worked fine prevously. Today when I opened Entourage,
the only message I get is "no schedules pending." "Not connected" is
appended after my name in the Exchange mailbox list. Running "exchange
lookup" from the Scripts menu produces nothing but an error message
that says "an error of type 29300 has occurred."

Any ideas?

John

 

[William Smith]

I hadn't used my Mac Powerbook Pismo on the office network for over
two weeks. It worked fine prevously. Today when I opened Entourage,
the only message I get is "no schedules pending." "Not connected" is
appended after my name in the Exchange mailbox list. Running "exchange
lookup" from the Scripts menu produces nothing but an error message
that says "an error of type 29300 has occurred."

Hi John!

I'm not sure about the error code but this could be as simple as having
to re-enter your password or as complex as having to troubleshoot your
network connection.

Can you access anything on the network? Can you connect to a file
server, browse the Internet or print something?

If you can get to the network then use the Network Utility found in
/Applications/Utilities to "ping" your Exchange Server's address. Do you
get a response? Be sure to use the full name such as
"exchange.domain.com" and not just "exchange".

If you can ping your Exchange server then test your account by trying to
log in via Outlook Web Access (OWA). Does that work?

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

 

[tnseller]

Hi John!

I'm not sure about the error code but this could be as simple as having
to re-enter your password or as complex as having to troubleshoot your
network connection.

Can you access anything on the network? Can you connect to a file
server, browse the Internet or print something?

If you can get to the network then use the Network Utility found in
/Applications/Utilities to "ping" your Exchange Server's address. Do you
get a response? Be sure to use the full name such as
"exchange.domain.com" and not just "exchange".

If you can ping your Exchange server then test your account by trying to
log in via Outlook Web Access (OWA). Does that work?

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

Thanks, Bill. I should have given more information. Yes, I can get to
the office network, I can log on to our various servers, I used OWA
(and am now too) to get mail, I can get mail with Classic Outlook for
Mac, and I have no trouble accessing the internet. Entourage is the
jinx. I tried it again a few minutes ago and got the same "there are
no schedules pending" in the lower right corner where it should show
update of folders progress.

I just tried the network utility and got this response:

"--- server02.gouldturner.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 0.448/0.543/1.043 ms"

The way I read that my computer's seeing the server. I'm thinking
something happened when the email server went down a week ago. I can't
ask our main IT guy because he hates Macs and wouldn't give me any
information anyway. There's another guy that might have some
information though.

John

 

[William Smith]

The way I read that my computer's seeing the server. I'm thinking
something happened when the email server went down a week ago. I can't
ask our main IT guy because he hates Macs and wouldn't give me any
information anyway. There's another guy that might have some
information though.

That last part is a good indicator that something has changed server
side. I'm suspecting that WebDAV is not enabled on your server anymore.

To test this you should try accessing your account in Safari using the
server's Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface. If that doesn't work then
Entourage won't work. You'll use the same server address you have in
Entourage in the form of:

"http://server.domain.com/exchange"

Good luck!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

 

[tnseller]

That last part is a good indicator that something has changed server
side. I'm suspecting that WebDAV is not enabled on your server anymore.

To test this you should try accessing your account in Safari using the
server's Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface. If that doesn't work then
Entourage won't work. You'll use the same server address you have in
Entourage in the form of:

"http://server.domain.com/exchange"

Good luck!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

Bill,

I use FireFox instead of Safari. Yesterday I had OWA up most of the
day in FireFox, using the web address you listed above. I had
discovered that last summer and it's been working fine since then. For
some reason it's not working this morning, but that happens
occasionally on this network. I suspect I'll be able to get back into
the server that way later today.

Even though I could get to the server all day yesterday via OWA,
Entourage wouldn't work. I ended up using Classic Outlook instead. I
think some little thing has changed in the setup code lines for
Entourage.

John