Outlook and Exchange – Send/Receive Settings Verification Needed

In most of our client sides we deploy Office 2007 via Group Policy as our corporate clients are on Open Value Agreements and most of our non-profits are using TechSoup for theirs.

When we run the Office 2007 setup.exe /admin [Enter] from the command line to create our MST file, one of the things we make sure to do is to customize the send/receive settings for the Outlook client.

By default, we prefer the Send immediately when connected setting not be checked for those, “oh oh, I missed something” moments where the user wants to get back into that e-mail and make changes:

After clicking the Send/Receive button in the above screenshot we are presented with:

Out of the box, the default Send/Receive time cycle is 30 minutes. When creating the MST file we make sure to set that to 5 minutes. Though lately, we have needed to make sure the newly set up client has the correct time interval settings.

For some reason, the default 30 minute Send/Receive cycle has been the setting in the user’s Outlook setup out of the box.

Now, for the critical setting:

Besides the Send/Receive setting not being the 5 minute interval, the Include the selected account in this group check mark has not been checked for the Microsoft Exchange account.

What we have been seeing is the Send/Receive immediately setting enabled, the above Microsoft Exchange account group not checked, and users calling us to ask why their Public Folders content was updating on everyone else’s system but theirs!

So, we now take a quick check to make sure that the above settings are indeed in place before handing the system, or new network profile, over to the user.

One other area we will be investigating is Group Policy management for Office 2007 settings as we get settled into the new GP setup in Windows Server 2008/SBS 2008. Once we have the Group Policy Objects in place, we will make sure the settings are in place for all of the SBS domain clients.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer