Urgent: Outlook Disaster Recovery

[Steve W]

I know we only talk when there's a crisis.

In short, we lost our exchange 2003 server. Reinstalled Win2k Advanced,
Exchange 2003, recreated mailboxes. The old IS was blown away, we're
restoring a backup. In the meantime, I have many sales and execs who sync to
an .ost. I've locked all the mailboxes in fear that if they connect and
Outlook wants to sync, it will essentially delete the entire contents of the
..ost file, leaving them with nothing. Is this a sound theory or paranoid
conjecture? Has anyone found a solid tool to convert 2003 Outlook clients
from ost to pst? Any other pitfalls I should be aware of, in case you've
suffered the same hell we are?

TIA

Steve

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Outlook 2003 is much better than previous versions about not connecting to new or damaged mailboxes. Users should see a choice between connecting to the new mailbox, which will give them mail access, or connecting to their old offline folders. Once you've confirmed for yourself that this is the way it works, you'll want to unlock the mailbox access so you can send an email message to these users telling them what to do. They'll need to start Outlook with the offline folders and move or export everything to a .pst file. They can then restart Outlook with the live mailbox and import everything from the .pst file.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Steve W]

Sue,

Thank you for your help, that is exactly what I did this morning. Good deeds
never go unpunished, so my next question (hopefully the last) is, when users
type in a name in the to field, it does resolve by underlining the name, but
fails delivering. If they click the "To:" button and choose from the GAL, it
works fine. What am I missing here? This is internal mail, of course.

Thank you again.

Steve
Outlook 2003 is much better than previous versions about not connecting to
new or damaged mailboxes. Users should see a choice between connecting to
the new mailbox, which will give them mail access, or connecting to their
old offline folders. Once you've confirmed for yourself that this is the way
it works, you'll want to unlock the mailbox access so you can send an email
message to these users telling them what to do. They'll need to start
Outlook with the offline folders and move or export everything to a .pst
file. They can then restart Outlook with the live mailbox and import
everything from the .pst file.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Leif Pedersen [MVP]]

Hi,

It must be finding the match in Outlooks autocomplete cache (*.nk2 file),
try renaming this file, restart Outlook and see what happens.

Leif