Office 365 – Outlook 2013 Autodiscover Problems

A client migrated themselves to Office 365 from an existing on-premise Exchange at the weekend and called us as they were having problems configuring Outlook 2013.  Everytime they set it up it would auto-discover the existing Exchange server and not Office 365.

You can’t really set Outlook up manually for the Office 365 Exchange Servers as they change and discovering the correct names is no easy task either.

The Autodiscover records were correct and were verified using Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer and by doing an NSLOOKUP on the machine to confirm the DNS records were correct.

However if a computer is on a domain then Outlook checks Active Directory for an SCP Object to determine what server to use, to get Oulook to ignore this setting you need to add a registry entry

1. Click Start, click Run, and then type regedit.
2. Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice15.0OutlookAutoDiscover
3. Set the following values for the Value Names listed below:
“ExcludeScpLookup”=dword:1

Moral of the story, Office 365 is a great product and goes a long way to help non-IT to self manage their setup, but if you’re going to migrate then get some professional advise to ensure it goes smoothly.