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Shortly after our upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 we had several reports that the Out of Office assistant was no longer useable. The reported error was that the Exchange Server could not be found or that the server was unavailable. The Microsoft recommended solution was to use OWA to change the OOF settings which we found to be unacceptable. After some steady digging into the configuration we found a much more satisfactory solution which I have detailed below:

The issue turned out to be the Service Connection Point configuration which had been neglected during the initial system configuration. To find out what the SCP is set to first open the Exchange Management Shell on your server, then use the Get-ClientAccessServer | fl Name,AutodiscoverServiceInternalUri command. That will show you the current SCP for all of your servers.

Now to configure your Autodiscover Service correctly use Set-ClientAccessServer -Identity <your-server-name> -AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri “https://<your-internal-Exchange-url>/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml”. Now one last step, you will need to set the web services directory to point to the correct interal and external URLs. Do that using Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory set-WebservicesVirtualDirectory -intrnalurl https://<your-internal-Exchange-url>/EWS/Exchange.asmx -externalurl https://<your-external-Exchange-url>/EWS/Exchange.asmx.

It will also be necessary to update your security certificates on the internal machines (and possibly generate a new security certificate depending on your configuration) to avoid getting a security error. But you should now be free to alter your OOF settings from Outlook 2007 with no further error messages.

As always if I’ve saved you some time please feel free to Donate: