Thursday, October 23, 2008

Sometimes Servers Just Need A Stern Talking-To

Here I am giving one of my Exchange servers a piece of my mind.

Photo by Ryan Starck

Fixing the "Unable to activate send-on-behalf-of list" Error

This MS Exchange Team Blog article (as well as this follow-up) go into great detail about the history of this notorious error, but erroneously claims that it only occurs in muli-domain environments.  We have the issue here, and we have a single-domain forest.

The short version is that Exchange Server 2003 SP2 introduced changes in the security model for the delegate-setting process which, combined with updates on the client end, result in the following error when a user attempts to modify delegates:

The Delegates settings were not saved correctly. Unable to activate send-on-behalf-of list. You do not have sufficient permission to perform this operation on this object.

This error does not occur for all mailbox, and we've found neither rhyme nor reason for when it does, but there is a fix.

  • For Outlook 2003 users apply this patch, then perform the registry modifications described here.
  • For Outlook 2007 users apply this patch, then perform the registry modifications described here.

Entourage Issues with the Office:mac 12.1.3 Update

First notice I saw about the issue was here:

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/office_1213_update_breaks_sending_exchange_meeting_invitatio.html

 The reported issue is an error -17997 being generated when Entourage users attempt to send meeting invitations. I was unable to reproduce the issue in my own testing, but that was before the following two updates:

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/update_on_1213_problems.html

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/update_on_1213_problems_part_2.html

 

It seems that the problem manifests if the Entourage identity contains POP3 and/or IMAP4 accounts in conjunction with the Exchange account, with the non-Exchange accounts added to the identity PRIOR to the Exchange account.  Both updates mention workarounds. MacBU is aware of the issue and is working on an update.

 

The two workarounds mentioned are:

  •  Drag the message from the outbox to the drafts folder and sending it from their (a clumsy workaround at best)
  • Recreate your Entourage identity from scratch, making sure to configure the Exchange account BEFORE configuring any non-Exchange accounts.  Please note that this will force re-synchronization of the local cache data, which can take a considerable amount of time for large mailboxes.  One way to minimize this would be to configure Entourage to only cache partial messages (In the account settings, Options tab, select “Partially receive messages over x KB”).