How To Setup Exchange 2007 Account Automatically in Entourage 2008 Thru Autodiscover

Entourage 2008 with SP1 can use Autodiscover Service available on Exchange 2007 Server to configure your Exchange account automatically. In this post I will talk about this new feature from Entourage user perspective. I have also recorded a screencast to actually show you how you can do it in Entourage 2008. Please keep in mind that this feature is not available in earlier versions of Entourage (2004 and earlier) & Exchange (2003 & earlier).

What’s Autodiscover Service?
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 includes a new Microsoft Exchange service named the Autodiscover service. The Autodiscover service configures client computers for Exchange mailbox access that are running Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 or Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac. The Autodiscover service can also configure supported mobile devices (Windows Mobile or iPhone). The Autodiscover service provides access to Microsoft Exchange features for Outlook 2007 or Entourage 2008 clients that are connected to your Microsoft Exchange messaging environment. The Autodiscover service must be deployed and configured correctly for Outlook or Entourage clients to automatically connect to Microsoft Exchange features, such as the Availability service (used for Free/Busy info pull-up), OOF Assistant and Delegate management. Additionally, these Exchange features must be configured correctly to provide their respective functionality for Outlook & Entourage clients. You can go here for more info.

Now a couple of important points:

1. Entourage Version – Check to see which version of Entourage you are using. You should be using the latest released version (build), currently its 12.1.5 (081119). In order to check for that, launch Entourage, go to ‘Entourage’ menu on top left hand corner and then click on ‘About Entourage’, the top potion of resulting window should look like this:

If your version (build) does not match, you need to install all available updates for Office 2008 for Mac. You can do that by going to ‘Help’ menu and clicking on ‘Check for Updates’. ‘Microsoft AutoUpdate’ application will launch and you can then click on ‘Check for Updates’ button there to have it look for all available updates. It will check for released updates, will come back and report to you about them and you can then install them one by one. You can also download and install all updates from Mactopia.

2. Exchange Version – Check to see which version of Exchange Server is hosting your mailbox. You can do so by logging into your mailbox thru OWA or ‘Outlook Web Access’ (explained in screencast video). Generally organizations publish a website for this purpose, like Microsoft has published this website for its employees to log into their mailboxes thru OWA. You should have one as well, if you don’t know its address or URL, you should talk to your Exchange Server Administrator or IT Help Desk/Support in your organization.

The very first mention of Exchange Server version can be found on the main login page for OWA, it looks like this if it’s not published thru Microsoft ISA Firewall Server (see ‘Microsoft Exchange’ & ‘2007’ in the screenshot below):

Screencast video also talks about this in the beginning, where OWA has been published thru Microsoft ISA Firewall Server thus the login page looks a bit different. Let’s watch the screencast now.

Note: If you meet the requirements listed above and automatic Exchange account configuration still does not work for you, then it could be because your Exchange Server Administrator has not published Autodiscover Service properly. You should then contact your administrator to verify that. You can provide this link to get him started on that.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2009
  How do you deal with the RTF bug between Entourage 2008 and Exchange 2007? In short, HTML formatted e-mail is converted to plain text e-mail when it is send to an external user.  Same e-mail sent to an "internal" emailaccount works fine (HTML keeps HTML).

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2009
  Ronald Gros, Though your question does not relate to the subject of the post, I will still try my best to help you out. Read this post (very clear and to the point): http://blog.mreza.info/archive/2008/09/11/pow-1-sending-html-e-mails-to-remote-domains-via-owa-2007.aspx Get info on your current setting, see if that's set to MIMEText (Plain Text), if yes, set it to MIMEHtmlText (HTML), that should resolve your issue. For More Info: How to Configure Message Format Settings for a Remote Domain http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125174.aspx Let us know if this resolves the issue or not. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2009
  Hello Amir Your blog is very great. AND.. Can I download the video to my hard disk in this post ? Have a nice day.

• Anonymous
  April 02, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2009
  Hi Amir, I have read many of your posts lately on Entourage and Exchange.  You always include great info in your blogs.  Although none of them helped me resolve the issue I was having with authentication and autodiscover, they did give me some good insight into Entourage (being recently thrust into managing Mac's in an AD environment). Anyway, I am wondering if there is a way to force Entourage to rerun autodiscover just as Outlook reruns it at specified intervals. Here is my issue, we are migrating from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.  I have many Mac users using Entourage already configured to connect to the Exchange 2003 mailbox servers.  I want them to automatically pull their new mail settings from Autodiscover (yes I have confirmed this is working when setting up a new email account)so that they are pointing to my Exchange 2007 CAS servers instead of the Exchange 2003 servers which will be decommisioned after all mailboxes are moved. Do you have any suggestions for me?   Thx  

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2009
  online game, I am working to redo this and other videos, I will consider your suggestion there. Mattfb, Your first issue has already been resolved, send this feedback thru Connect and you will get proper follow up with details. For your 2nd issue, I have seen that myself working with one customer. Entourage depends on Apple Keychain in Mac OS when it works with certificates. Look in Keychain, do you see the certificate for DigiCert CA? Match that with what you find in Windows (certmgr.msc) or use IE : Options : Content : Certificates. If proper Root CA certificate is not there in Keychain, Entourage won't be able to establish trusted SSL channel. jsinnwell, Yes, you are right, that's a known limitation of Entourage 2008 DAV Version which your users are currently using. This has been resolved in Entourage EWS (works identically to Outlook 2007 in this case), which is currently in beta, you can test it out yourself by going to: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros/entourage-ews.mspx

• Anonymous
  April 14, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 16, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2009
  I bought the new Mac Book Pro with Leopard operating system and Entourage 2008 installed. I tried to configure Entourage to be as the default email program to work with Microsoft Exchange 2007 (which is installed under the Windows Server 2003 64-bit platform).  Entourage sends and receives emails using IMAP but unable to sync with the address book, Calendar, or viewing the sub files of my inbox on the exchange server. Also sometimes I get the email twice on my Mac Book but once on a windows outlook email client.  When I configured it to connect to MS Exchange Server 2007 using the “new account” – Exchange option it didn’t connect to the exchange server (basically I doesn’t bring anything from the exchange server using the exchange setup option when setting up the new account on the macbook)”.   Please not that I’ve tried the setup of Entourage 2008 (Mac Workstation and not my MacBookPro) to “another” Exchange 2007 Server 32 bit and it worked!!! I appreciate any help with this regards as I am new to the MAC world and I like it so far but my business and my personal productivity took a serious negative impact because of the fact that my emails or calendar are not sync. Much appreciated. Tareq.

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2009
  I'm having a specific issue, and was wondering if you have any insight.  I have Exch 2003 with Entourage 2008 client.  Setup and connection went smooth and is fully synch'd.  However ALL outgoing messages sent from Entourage get tagged as spam by the receiving server.   The reason reported is: RCVD_NUMERIC_HELO Received: contains an IP address used for HELO Outgoing messages work fine using Outlook or OWA. Could this have something to do with the domain or server name fields I used during entourage setup?   Or maybe I setup WebDAV access incorrectly on the server? Thanks for the helpful blog.

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2009
  The comment has been removed