Outlook Advanced Search Error

Issue

When you try to run Advanced Search in Microsoft Outlook following error appears

“Outlook cannot perform your search. Outlook cannot display this view”

 

Simple Search works fine but the issue only occurs when searching a shared or just one mailbox. All users that access this mailbox have same symptom.

Resolution

Since all users are getting the same issue, its not just outlook. There is some wrong with the mailbox itself. In most cases it is a custom Search Folder that is creating this issue.

there are two ways to resolve this issue.

1. Delete the Search Folder that is not working properly (Right Click –> Delete Folder)

2.

a. Create a new mapi profile for just that one mailbox and make sure that Outlook prompts you to choose a profile when opened

b. Go to Start –> Run or press Win+R keys and type outlook /cleanfinders press Enter

c. Choose the profile for the mailbox that has issue

 

Any of the above actions will clear the broken search folder, fixing the search issue.

Shared Mailboxes and Sent Items Saved Location

 

This has been a big design issue with Outlook. Following are the issues.

• When you have multiple mailboxes and send from a secondary mailbox, the sent item gets saved in the default mailbox of Outlook profile.
• If the mailbox is shared between multiple people, it is hard to keep track of sent communication by that one mailbox.

To fix this issue two things need to be done.

1. Apply the hotfix below

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970944

2. Apply the following registry settings.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972148

Outlook Calendar and Daylight Saving Time

Reoccurring appointments with wrong time

After you have made sure that all your exchange servers have applied correct time settings, clients (workstations) are in sync too and you have a few users complaining about time being incorrect in some of their reoccurring calendar appointments then considering the following may help. Outlook 2010 users may not be effected by this issue but if they are then the following link refers to a Time Zone Data Update Tool for it.

According to the following article Microsoft recommends to use Time Zone Data Update Tool for pre Outlook 2010 clients. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

Here is the link to download 32bit tool for pre Outlook 2010 client http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

If you don't want to use the tool or if it doesn't fix the issue then manual edit of the appointment is required. This applies to reoccurring appointments.

Go to Outlook > Calendar and open the series of the reoccurring appointment which is not displaying time correctly.

Then click on reoccurrence button and here you will notice that the appointment time is displayed correctly. There are two ways to fix it.

1. Remove reoccurrence save the appointment and apply it again
2. Change the time zone to a different one and save the appointment then apply the correct time zone again and save the appointment.

Both of these options will generate updates and send it to all attendees, fixing the appointment time on their calendars are well.

Outlook 2007 crashes on Import/Export

Lets say you are trying to export your contacts to a Tab Delimited Text file or CSV file. The process begins but outlook crashes right away leaving the following event in your event log

Event ID: 1000
Source: Microsoft Office 12

Discription:
Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6514.5000, stamp 4a89dc70, faulting module oladd.fae, version 12.0.6500.5000, stamp 49a6ed5f, debug? 0, fault address 0x00008c24.

One of the reasons why it might happen is that Microsoft Exchange Management Tools for Exchange 2007 are installed on the computer and Microsoft says it not supported.

To Fix it

Open command prompt and type fixmapi and press enter (there will be no notification, its instant)

Make sure Outlook is closed while you do the above, reopen Outlook and try to Export it should now work fine.

Disable Send Out of Office auto-replies to External Senders in Exchange 2007

You don’t want users in your organization to send Out of Office Auto-replies to external recipients and also you don’t want the option to appear in Outlook 2007 like shown below

To disable/hide the option Outside My Organization in Out of Office Assistant in Outlook and in OWA use the following in Exchange Management Shell.

Set-Mailbox <mailboxid> -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

This can be changed per mailbox, if you want to be applied to all mailboxes there are many ways of approaching it. You can get mailboxes on a server and pipe it with Set-Mailbox with above settings Or the following will apply it on all mailboxes in an exchange organization.

Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

-ResultSize Unlimited is important otherwise it will change the setting for the first 1000 mailboxes.

For more details on Out of Office Assistant refer to the link below.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/10/06/429115.aspx

Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.

When opening outlook following error occurs

“Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.”

Resolution

there are two ways of fixing it.

1. Go to Start menu chose run and type the following and press enter
   
   outlook /resetnavpane
   
   This will open outlook, close Outlook and try to reopen it normally. If it still gives you the error then you an do it the hard way and that is following.
2. Go to %appdata%\microsoft\outlook\(type this in Run and press enter)
   and delete the profilename.xml, outcmd.dat and outlprnt files.
   
   If you are not sure which xml file to delete just delete all xml files and the two mentioned files at above location.