Outlook 2013 SP1 fails to connect to Exchange in a multi-forest environment

Symptoms

Consider the following scenario:

• Two Microsoft Exchange organizations are configured to federate. Fabrikam.com and Contoso.com are used in this example.

• The Export-AutoDiscoverConfig cmdlet was used to export Autodiscover information from each organization to the other.

• Your mailbox is in Contoso.com.

• You are using Microsoft Outlook 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on a computer that is logged on to the Contoso.com domain.

In this scenario, you notice the following symptoms:

• In an existing Outlook profile, the Exchange email account is no longer updated by the Autodiscover process.

• If you create a new Outlook messaging profile to connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox, the Exchange email account configuration is not successful.

• If you use Test E-mail AutoConfiguration to initiate an Autodiscover process, you notice the 0x800C8203 error is displayed in the results.

• You see the Outlook Autodiscover process try to connect to the default, predefined Autodiscover URLs.

Cause

Outlook 2013 SP1 first retrieves the imported service connection point (SCP) object of the remote organization (in this example, Fabrikam.com). Therefore, it tries to connect to the Fabrikam Autodiscover URL. After Outlook fails to reach the Fabrikam URL, it finally tries to connect to the predefined Contoso.com Autodiscover URLs:

https://contoso.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

https://autodiscover.contoso.com/autodiscover.xmlHowever, because Outlook does not retrieve the local Contoso SCP object, it does not try to connect to the internal Contoso URL (for example https://CAS1.contoso.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml, in which CAS1 is the name of the Client Access server).

Resolution

To resolve this issue, apply the update that is described in the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

2878323  Description of the Outlook 2013 hotfix package (Outlook-x-none.msp): April 8, 2014

Workaround

If you cannot install hotfix package KB 2878323, the network administrator can create DNS records to make the autodiscover.contoso.com record also reachable by Outlook clients on the internal network.

More Information

To start the Test E-mail AutoConfiguration tool, follow these steps:

1. Start Outlook.

2. Hold down the Ctrl key, right-click the Outlook icon in the notification area, and then click Test E-mail AutoConfiguration.

3. Verify that the correct email address is in the E-mail Address box.

4. In the Test E-mail AutoConfiguration window, click to clear the Use Guessmart check box and the Secure Guessmart Authentication check box.

5. Click to select the Use AutoDiscover check box, and then click Test.