office 365 autodiscover not working outlook

Still, administrators had to do it repeatedly, thereby making configuration cumbersome and, in some ways, an annoying task. In fact, a lot of these configurations made no sense. Also, more configurations were needed to use the latest features available in Outlook 2003.

This meant that administrators had to know the name of the Exchange server to configure Outlook. Before Outlook 2007, administrators had to configure the Exchange clients manually. To understand why this feature is so essential, let’s step back a bit. The advantage of this service is that it establishes the initial connections to Exchange user mailboxes, so users can access many features such as the offline address book. Shutterstock What is autodiscover?Īutodiscover is a service or feature that allows Outlook administrators to configure the user profile settings for Outlook 2007 and later. Let’s get to a detailed explanation of what it is and how it works. Well, that’s Outlook’s autodiscover in a nutshell. This forces Outlook to bypass the initial root domain queries and get the autoodiscover settings with minimal delay.įor domain-joined Windows clients, you may use the Office 2013 Administrative Templates or Office 2016 Administrative Templates to apply this workaround on multiple computers.ĭownload and extract the files, and then copy the content of the ADMX folder to the PoliciesDefinitions folder in the SYSVOL domain share.Imagine how convenient it would be if users can automatically connect to their email servers without having to configure the settings manually. To workaround this issue, until a more permanent solution can be applied, you may use the following Registry settings to force Outlook to bypass the root domain discovery and redirect to the autodiscover CNAME or A record to resolve the address for autodiscover settings. Most organizations use a autodiscover CNAME or A record to resolve the autodiscover address, which is also the recommended solution for both on on-premise Exchange deployment and when all mailboxes are placed in Exchange Online.

The situation is furthermore complicated when the option to manually enter the Exchange server settings is removed in Outlook 2016.Ĭommon for these cases is that the internal autodiscover CNAME record is added in a split-DNS zone and resolves to – straight out of the Office 365 domain registration wizard.ĭigging deeper, the Test E-mail AutoConfiguration reveals that the autodiscover process is delayed by a series of (16) queries and the subsequent timeout for autodiscover settings from the root domain, like. As the use of Office 2016 has started to gain momentum, a number of organizations have experienced cases where Outlook 2016 take extraordinary long time to setup a new profile with a hosted Exchange 2010/2013 solution, like Exchange Online.

Office 365 autodiscover not working outlook