Outlook Crashes - Exchange 2013 or Exchange 2016 Backend

We’ve been deploying Office/Outlook 2016 and Exchange 2016 CU1 in our Small Business Solution (SBS) both on-premises and in our Cloud.

Since we’re deploying Exchange with a single common name certificate we are using the _autodiscover._tcp.domain.com method for AutoDiscover.

A lot of our searching turned up “problems” around AutoDiscover but pretty much all of them were red herrings.

It turns out the Microsoft has deprecated the RPC over HTTPS setup in Outlook 2016. What does this mean?

MAPI over HTTPS is the go-to for Outlook communication with Exchange going forward.

Well, guess what?

MAPI over HTTPS is _disabled_ out of the box!

In Exchange PowerShell check on the service’s status:

Get-OrganizationConfig | fl *mapi*

To enable:

Set-OrganizationConfig -MapiHttpEnabled $true

Then, we need to set the virtual directory configuration:

Get-MapiVirtualDirectory -Server EXCHANGESERVER | Set-MapiVirtualDirectory -InternalUrl  https://mail.DOMAIN.net/MAPI -ExternalUrl https://mail.DOMAIN.net/MAPI

Verify the settings took:

Get-MapiVirtualDirectory -Server EXCHANGESERVER | FL InternalUrl,ExternalUrl

And finally, test the setup:

Test-OutlookConnectivity -RunFromServerId EXCHANGESERVER -ProbeIdentity OutlookMapiHttpSelfTestProbe

EXCHANGESERVER needs to be changed to the Exchange server name.

Hat Tip: Mark Gossa: Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016 MAPI over HTTP

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
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