Paul Davey's Blog

Fixing Problems in an I.T World.. With A Hammer and Sticky Tape..

Windows Vista IE7 and Exchange Webmail (Problems & Fix)

OK - so you have vista loaded and of course it includes IE7. But.. when you login to your Exchange 2003 webmail, you find you have the following problems.

- Cannot compose a new e-mail message.
- Cannot reply to an e-mail message.
- Unable to create a new contact, task, note, journal entry, or appointment.
- Unable to change any configuration in the Outlook Web Access options folder.

It seems that this is a real problem for people and there doesnt appear to be a well documented resolution for the issue.. until now.

Here it is people. KB911829, a hotfix for Exchange will resolve the problem. The whole problem is down to DHTML in IE within Vista (and the lack of support), so webmail is broken. You would have thought that they would have tested this one before release wouldnt you? Oh, and by the way I have tested it here in my Lab environment and yes, you *DO* have to bounce your box and have some outage to get the hotfix to properly apply and work. The hotfix is great, but if you have problems trying to convince your Exchange admin to install it or dont want to wait, here is a workaround.

Client Workaround - The S/Mime Fix!
On the client, login to webmail as normal. Now go to the Options Menu and select to install the update for S/Mime. Voila.. once installed normal service is resumed.

I hope that this tip helps some of you sys admins out!

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