mercoledì 13 febbraio 2013

Outlook Shared Mailbox - folder disappeared

Hi all,
this time I would like to share what I just discovered on Outlook.

We are using many Outlook with the cache enabled in our company, connected to the Exchange server in another country with a slow wan connection.

Many users have shared mailboxes configured in Outlook and it happens very often that some folder simply "disappear" from the shared mailbox.
But it is not deleted, because using web-access (OWA) the folder is still there!

It seems that nothing but delete the cache can resolve this, I tried scanost, tried closing outlook, restarting the pc, and many other things but at the end only deleting and recreating the cache resolved the issue and make the folder reappeas.
The problem is the bandwidth impact, if you are using a slow wan like me is a nightmare to delete 10GB of cache and redownload from the WAN, it could take hours!

Until now.
I discovered that the workaround is simply to go to one of the user that doesn't see the folder anymore and CREATE a new folder with a RANDOM name in the shared mailbox (for example "dummy").
Once done it happened to me that magically the missing folder reappered to the ALL the users that was missing it! so not just on this pc but also all the other.

The workaround is not perfect, in one occasion the first time I tried the folder appeared and disappeared in 1 second, I had to delete the dummy folder and recreate again, the missing one appeared and I clicked it so that the sync process started. From that point on , the folder didn't disappeared again.

Also I still need to test it in other situations, for example in mailboxes with many sub-folders, but until now this is the faster and less bandw. impacting workaround I have found.

Let me know your experience and if this workaround is working also for you :)

bye
Digger