Monday, November 7, 2011

Outlook 2011 on the Mac will not start

We use Intermedia hosted exchange with Macs and PCs and a few Linux workstations.

One of my partners comes over and tells me that he is having a problem Outlook 2011 on his Mac Air.  When he launches it, Outlook briefly flashes the splash screen then closes.  He thinks that it may be related to some anti-virus software that he installed and uninstalled.  I have no idea.

I hit Google and find a reference to repairing damaged user profiles on Office 2011 Mac.  Launch Outlook while holding the Option key and it brings up the profiles and you can repair the profile.  Repairing goes through a few steps in which it scans the database, repairs it, makes a backup, then copies all the records.  Piece of cake, Outlook now launches and the user is up and running again.

Until... the same person comes over and asks why he is receiving alerts that he has hit his quota.  He had a 2GB quota, which lasted about 8 months, and a month ago I increased his quota to 3GB.  There is no way he should have been at his quota.  We look at his screen and see that Outlook is uploading data.  ACK!  The profile repair made outlook think that all it's data was not on the exchange server, so it was uploading everything back into exchange, an creating duplicate data. I exited outlook, launched it with the option key, created a new profile, set it as the default, then launched it and configured it with the Exchange server.

Lesson learned.  Don't fix profiles on Outlook when Outlook is connected to an Exchange Server.  Just remove the profile, create a new one, and let Outlook re-download all the data that it needs from the exchange server.  That would have been way easier and would have avoided all the duplicates.

Next posting will probably be on de-duping data in outlook...

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