Outlook UI Issue : Could not install the custom actions

Recently i run into this issue with Windows Server 2008 (x64) & Outlook 2007 SP2 (online – which had earlier Cached mode, later changed back to Online) machine. Whenever i tried to open a message or create a new one, i get this error message – “Could not install the custom actions. The object could not be found”. Later i tried to have a  look(bugging) into my machine. I found it’s because of the corrupt forms cache.

I fixed the issue like this.

1. Close Outlook.
2. Under C:Users find the folder for the user who’s experiencing the problem.
Note: Make sure under the Tools, Folder Options menu that system files are not hidden.
3. Go to AppDataLocalMicrosoftFORMS, and delete the file FRMCACHE.DAT
4. After clearing the FRMCACHE.DAT, restart Outlook.

This steps resolved the issue!! Happy Outlook troubleshooting!!

Outlook Errors : General Errors – Part # 2

Receive error when you press F9 to send and receive e-mail in Outlook 2007 & Cached Exchange Mode:

You use Cached Exchange Mode in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Additionally, you use the DownloadOAB registry value to prevent the automatic download of the offline address book (OAB). When you press F9 to send and receive e-mail messages in all Outlook accounts, Outlook unexpectedly tries to download the OAB. Additionally, you receive the following error message:

TASK ‘Microsoft Exchange Server’ reported error (0x8004010F) : The operation failed. An object could not be found.

To resolve this problem, apply hotfix 939596. Additionally, you must turn off the option to download the offline address book before you press F9.

Reference: For more details refer this KB article and how to obtain the hotfix to resolve the issue.

Error message when you try to synchronize Outlook to a Windows Live Hotmail account: "Error with Send/Receive"

You use the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector to synchronize Microsoft Office Outlook to a Windows Live Hotmail account. If the synchronization fails after several attempts, the synchronization process stops. Additionally, you receive the following error message:

Error in Mail. Error with Send/Receive. http://g.live.com/1OLC12URL/SyncLimit

This issue occurs if the Windows Live Hotmail account cannot currently be synchronized. To avoid saturating the synchronization limit for the account, the Outlook Connector preemptively stops the synchronization process.

Reference: For more details refer this KB article to find the workaround to resolve the issue.

Synchronization : Exchange Server & Outlook

Exchange Server 2003 and later versions of Exchange Server provide support for certain Outlook features, and Office Outlook 2007 works better with Exchange Server 2003 or later in several ways for other features. Several of these features were introduced in Outlook 2003—most notably for synchronization processing, user synchronization status reports, and junk e-mail filtering. Instant Search and automatic Exchange server discoverability are new in Office Outlook 2007.

Synchronization between Outlook & Exchange Server:

Synchronization processing between Outlook and Exchange is enhanced in a number of ways, starting in Outlook 2003. For example, data exchanged between the Outlook client and Exchange Server 2003 servers is compressed, and the data buffer size is larger. In addition, the buffers are packed, so more compressed data is included in each buffer. With these features, more data can be transferred with fewer server calls. This is especially beneficial when users are synchronizing across networks that charge by the byte of data that is transmitted. When large information sets are downloaded—for example, when users update their mailboxes after they have been on vacation—cost can be significantly lowered and the transaction can be shortened with these improvements.

Better status information about Cached Exchange Mode:

Another feature that users will notice is better status information about Cached Exchange Mode synchronization. With Exchange Server 2003 or later, the Outlook status bar shows detailed information about synchronization, such as:

• How many bytes have not been downloaded for the current folder

• How many items have not been downloaded in the current folder

• Approximately how long it will be until the current folder is synchronized

• Folder status, such as Up to Date and Last updated at date and time.

When used with latest Exchange Server:

When it is used with Exchange Server 2003 or later, the Headers Only mode in Outlook provides a 256-byte plain text preview that includes part of the message body, rather than showing just the message header information. This message preview can help remote users to make better decisions about whether to download a whole message—which, for example, might include a large attachment.

When used with latest Outlook & Exchange Server:

Using Outlook with Exchange Server 2003 or later also helps to provide a better experience for users in filtering junk e-mail messages. The Junk E-mail Filter in Outlook provides some support for Outlook users with Cached Exchange Mode on versions of Exchange Server earlier than Exchange Server 2003. The experience is much improved with Exchange Server 2003 or later.

New features of Outlook 2007 & Exchange Server 2007:
Several features that are new in Office Outlook 2007 also work better with Exchange 2007.

• Instant Search works better with Exchange 2007 when you use Outlook in Online mode with a mailbox server, because Outlook can use the index on Exchange Server 2007 for searching. To enable Instant Search when you use Outlook with earlier versions of Exchange, you must configure Outlook to index user mailboxes for each Exchange client. This extra step is required because indexing in Outlook on the user’s computer cannot be fully optimized, unlike the server indexing service that is implemented for Exchange Server 2007.
• If users are configured to use Cached Exchange Mode, Office Outlook 2007 indexes the search locally, regardless of the Exchange server version.
• In addition, Office Outlook 2007 automatically detects the user’s Exchange server with Exchange Server 2007.
• Automatic detection is also enabled under the following circumstances for earlier versions of Exchange: when the user’s computer is joined to a domain and when Exchange is in the same domain as the user account.

Exchange Server 2003 & Public folders

Some organizations use public folders heavily, while others do not. The degree to which public folders are used in your organization may have a large effect on how you plan for migration and coexistence of public folders and the data stored therein. Factors to consider include:

• The total number of public folders and the amount of data contained in them. Many organizations choose to remove unneeded folders from their public folder structure as part of their migration process.

• The number of existing replicas and where they are located. Because Exchange public folders can be easily replicated between servers, many organizations have placed public folder servers at remote sites to improve access for remote users; as part of server consolidation, these replicas will normally be re-homed elsewhere.

• The extent to which public folders are used as part of normal operations. If public folder-based applications are in use, how much are they used? Do users depend on them for their key tasks, or are they of secondary importance?

• The messaging clients to be used after the consolidation. Outlook 2003 can be configured to cache users’ public folder favorites; this makes public folder access in Cached Exchange Mode seamless, but it increases the size of the OST file, and it causes additional synchronization traffic. Requests for public folder items will be automatically directed to the best available replica, which may be in a distant site across a slow or high-latency link.  

Even if your organization does not use public folders for business reasons, Exchange still uses two important system public folders that must be accounted for in your planning.

First, the Schedule+ Free/Busy folder is where Exchange stores free/busy status for individual mailboxes. Outlook publishes users’ calendar status to this folder, as does the Exchange System Attendant.

Having multiple replicas of this folder helps ensure quick and consistent access to schedule data throughout the organization; however, these replicas have to be synchronized, which can add a substantial amount of network traffic.

When a user creates a new meeting request, Outlook opens a connection to find each attendee’s free/busy data. First, Outlook retrieves the user’s legacy distinguished name, which it then uses to identify the name of the free/busy folder it needs. Outlook then searches for the correct folder and message for the specified user’s schedule data. This means that a single meeting request may generate multiple un-cached connections to different servers.

On the other hand, adding multiple replicas of the free/busy folder means that changes made to one replica may take time to propagate to other replicas. Adjusting the number of replicas, their location, and the replication schedule used may be necessary to ensure the right balance between minimized access time and replication convergence.

Offline Address book is one of the advantage when you make use of public folder. The OAB provides offline and Cached Exchange Mode users access to a subset of properties for all objects in the global address list.

Exchange generates updates to the OAB periodically, and Outlook automatically downloads available changes once a day (in online mode) or when the user goes online (in Cached Exchange Mode).

In general, Microsoft’s normal recommendation is to maintain OAB replicas on each server that contains user mailboxes. As you consolidate user mailboxes, you should bear in mind that when the OAB changes, a large number of clients may need to download OAB changes at once, and plan network capacity and CPU allocation accordingly.

How to optimize memory usage in Exchange Server 2003

I found this wonderful article describes the optimization of memory usage on your computer that is running Exchange Server 2003.

For example, if you have 1 gigabyte (GB) or more of physical memory (RAM) installed on a server that is running Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, you must make sure that Exchange 2003 can make efficient use of that memory.

Please Note: Exchange 2003 performs an optimal memory configuration check when the store process starts. If the memory settings are not optimal, you will see event 9665 in Event Viewer. This message appears if one or more of the following conditions are true, as specified in the MSDN article.

It has many recommendations for each of the suggested settings.

Cached Exchange Mode

Cached Exchange Mode is a new feature in Outlook 2003.

When you turn on Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook 2003, and when the connection from your computer that is running Outlook 2003 to the Exchange Server 2003 computer is not available, Outlook switches to the Trying to connect state or to the Disconnected state. If the connection is restored, Outlook switches to the Connected state or to the Connected (Headers) state. Any changes that you made while you were offline are synchronized automatically when a connection to a server is available. You can continue to work while changes are synchronized.

Outlook 2003 Cached Exchange Mode offers you the following benefits:

• After messages have been cached locally, typical user operations do not cause interactions that block the server.

• Quickflagging, marking a message as read, replying, and editing require a small amount of data to be pushed up to the server to keep the mailboxes synchronized. However, the pushing of data occurs in the background. This behavior causes much faster access to messages and to attachments, because you work from the local copy instead of the server copy.
 
• Additionally, Cached Exchange Mode causes no loss of conventional functionality. New e-mail notifications, full Global Address List details, free/busy lookup, public folder access, and delegate support function as expected. However, this is true only when a network connection to an Exchange Server computer is present.
 
• Cached Exchange Mode provides intelligent use of bandwidth. This functionality is enabled by synchronizing only headers on slow connections (connections that are slower than 128 kilobits per second [Kbps]). This functionality works only when a network connection is present. 

Additionally, Cached Exchange Mode offers administrators the following benefits:

• Reduced server load. After messages are cached locally, re-opening the same message does not require server transactions.
 
• Reduced network load. After messages have been pulled over the network one time, subsequent access to those messages does not cause additional network traffic. Because messages are also compressed, there is an additional reduction on network load.

How Outlook 2003 synchronizes data in Cached Exchange Mode ?

Do you know how Outlook 2003 synchronizes data in Cached Exchange Mode?

Please find this useful article, which discusses about how the Outlook synchronizes the data in Cache mode

• The time that is required to complete the initial synchronization between Outlook 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 depends primarily on the size of the mailbox and on the speed of the connection to the Exchange Server 2003 computer.


• Access to all data is not available until the initial synchronization is complete.


• Therefore, we recommend that you use a fast connection when you start Cached Exchange Mode for the first time.


• After the initial synchronization is complete, Outlook 2003 keeps the local copy up to date automatically.


• If a change is made to the data on the server, Outlook 2003 is notified to synchronize the changes.


• Changes on the server may occur if a new message was received, or if another client made a change to existing data.


• If changes are made to the local data, Outlook 2003 synchronizes those changes with the server automatically.


• This process occurs in real time and does not require user intervention.