Turn to OWA when there's trouble

This tip was submitted to the SearchWin2000.com tip exchange by member Blake Mengotto. Please let other users know how useful it is by rating it below.

You may have been flooded with support calls when the Blaster worm was making its way through your network. Outlook users were having all kinds of issues and didn't understand why. People were under the impression that Exchange was down, when in fact it wasn't. The network was just saturated with RPC calls.

End users are quick to say Exchange is down, when usually it has to do something with the client configuration or the network between the client and the Exchange server. So what I suggest to all the people I support is to try accessing their mailboxes via Outlook Web Access (OWA) when their Outlook client is acting up. If they can get into their mailboxes from OWA, then chances are that their clients are misconfigured, DNS is spotty, or you may have LAN issues (maybe even a NIC card that is set to 10/AUTO).

During the BLASTER worm, OWA was a friend to many who were able to continue on with business as usual, despite the fact that they didn't have spell-checking capabilities.

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