In The Know: Should The Nation’s Unemployed Be Buying New Apple Computers?
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Microsoft have been making no secret of the fact that they do not want to continue having public folders in their flagship messaging server. With Exchange 2010, public folders are actively discouraged, with much of the Microsoft documentation suggesting that Sharepoint is a preferred alternative to public folders, this aside, if you still have legacy Outlook 2003 MAPI clients that need to connect to Exchange 2010 (or Exchange 2007 for that matter) you have no option, but to create and activate a public folder database on an Exchange 2010 server.
Having done created a public folder database on Exchange 2010 you may still, rather unexpectedly notice that Outlook 2003 clients cannot connect to the new Exchange 2010 mailbox server with Outlook producing an error indicating that it is unable to connect to the Exchange 2010 server due to a suspected network issue.
I have seen more than one version of this error, but unfortunately neglected to get some screen grabs at the time, if I find a machine exhibiting the error, I will update this post.
In Exchange 2010 MAPI connections are no longer handled directly by the Exchange server as they were in Exchange 2007, rather all MAPI connections to a Mailbox Server are handled by the CAS (Client Access Service) Server, and specifically by the new Exchange RPC Client Access Service. The reason for the sudden inability to connect to your new server via MAPI is caused by the fact that Exchange 2010 by default expects MAPI connections to be encrypted, while Outlook 2003 does not encrypt them by default.
You therefore have two potential solutions to this problem.
- Reconfigure Outlook 2003 to use an encrypted MAPI when communicating with the server
- Configure Exchange 2010 to globally disable encrypted MAPI connections
I would suggest the first method, as disabling encrypted MAPI connections by default just seems like a Bad Thing, however, read on if you want to know how to do this.
Configuring Outlook 2003 to use Encrypted MAPI Connections
First make sure that Outlook 2003 is not running. Then open the Control Panel and find the Mail applet, and double-click that:
On this page, click the “E-Mail Accounts” button:
Check the radio button beside “View or change existing e-mail accounts” and click next:
Highlight your Exchange account and Click the “change” button to re-configure that account:
Click the “More Settings” button, and then select the “Security” tab:
Make sure that you have a check mark in the check-box in the Encryption section, hit OK, next, finish and close, and fire up Outlook and it should connect as before.
Configuring Exchange 2010 to use Unencrypted Mapi Connections
Much of what happens in Exchange 2010 is configured through the Exchange Management Shell. To obtain information about the RPC CAS service, open a management Power Shell session and execute the following command:
Get-RpcClientAccess | fl
Notice the line that reads “EncryptionRequired” is set to “True”. This indicates the default of the MAPI RPC CAS Service on the Exchange 2010 CAS server. To global set this to false, you should execute Set-RpcClientAccess –server CAS-Server –EncryptionRequired $false in the EMS.
Again, in my opinion, this is a bad idea. I haven’t checked this, but I would be pretty sure you would be able to use Group Policy to update the connection settings on your legacy Outlook 2003 clients to use an encrypted MAPI connection by default. This would be a much better plan.
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