For this installment of “Justin’s Tech Tip of the Week”, we will be discussing the Autodiscover service and how to disable it on-premises. This is extremely useful when you are in the midst of a migration or performing a staged migration (some users in O365 while others are still on-premises) so that it doesn’t interfere with your migrated Office 365 users and the ability of their MS Outlook clients from seamlessly connecting to and working with Office 365.
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This solution applies to:
- Standard, staged migrations to Office 365 from Exchange 2007, 2010, or 2013.
- If you have already removed DNS entries on-premises for Autodiscover.
Does not apply to:
- Any kind of migration from Exchange 2003 or lower.
- Exchange Hybrid/Rich-Coexistence migrations (most cases)*
A common nuisance for customers as they are migrating to Office 365 is the incessant Autodiscover pop-ups that users tend to get with regard to the on-premises Exchange 2007/2010 environment. This situation may still persist even after all users have been moved to Office 365 from the on-premises environment.
The solution to this problem is to set the ClientAccessServer value for the on-premises Exchange bridgehead server to $Null. This is done via PowerShell on the on-premises Exchange server in question. PowerShell for Exchange 2007 and 2010 is also known as the Exchange Management Shell (EMS).
Here are the steps:
- Log into one of your on-premises Exchange 2007 or 2010 servers
- Open EMS (Exchange Management Shell)
- Run the following cmdlet – Get-ClientAccessServer This will query the environment and return the value of the actual, main CAS (Client Access Server) server for the environment.
- From the results in step 3, run: Set-ClientAccessServer –Identity “CASxx” –AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri $NULL – where “CASxx” is the name of the CAS server that discovered value.
By running these steps/commands, you are essentially removing the on-premises information with regard to Autodiscover; thus eliminating the conflict that your end users are experiencing between the O365 autodiscover and the on-premises one. This fix will greatly reduce the amount of help desk calls that your staff receives regarding this issue.
*For Hybrid migrations, refer to a previous tech-tip that I have posted entitled Alleviate local SSL cert pop-ups. There have been some select instances where implementing the fix here has been effective for a Hybrid migration scenario, but generally it is not the way to go.
And that is Justin’s Tech Tip of the Week.