I just went through another Microsoft experience this morning. Seems these things were rare when I first started in IT, but today take up just about all my time.
A staff member was having some issues with Outlook send-as permissions that I was unable to resolve. One of the solutions was to recreate the Outlook profile.
So, before I did her machine, I figured I’d do mine.
Turns out, I can’t create a new profile on my machine to duplicate my old one. There are two parts to this. Part 1 is Microsoft removed the ability to manually add an Exchange server profile in Outlook 2016. You can add every other type manually, except Exchange. You must use the Exchange autoconfigure feature to create the profile.
OK. Fine. So something I’ve done routinely for going on 25 years is now irrelevant because someone at Microsoft decided it should be that way.
But there’s a part 2. When Microsoft goes to check your email address that it gets from AD (or one that you put in) to get the autoconfig info, it checks O365 first, before it looks for a local server. And guess what. If you use your work email to create a Microsoft account, like to access VLSC for your corporate licensing, then that address gets comingled with the O365 universe.
So, under the default scenario and settings that Microsoft created, there is no way for me to recreate my previously-existing Outlook profile that points to my Exchange server account. Every attempt is redirected to an O365 account that I don’t have and a server which doesn’t have the correct autoconfig info that I can no longer adjust manually. I had to find an obscure registry entry that tells Outlook to forget O365 exists so that the whole process they forced me into would work as it’s supposed to.
It made me realize that when I first started in IT, if something was acting in a way that didn’t make sense, it was either because I had made an error in configuration, or there was a bug in the software.
Today, if something is acting in a way that doesn’t make sense, it’s nearly always traceable to some decision made in the bowels of Microsoft that is either for reasons counter to my needs or for reasons that are indecipherable. I spend way too much of my IT career of late cleaning up after messes Microsoft has made.
Sorry for the rant. Seems like a lifetime ago I was one of the first RedHat Certified Systems Engineers. I let it expire because nobody had a use for it back then. Fast forward to the post Windows 10 world and I’ve just started playing with Linux Mint on an old laptop. Looking promising. If I can’t get rid of MS at work, I can at least come home to a non-MS environment.
I know this is only peripherally relevant, but I needed to vent. And this sort of situation, day after day, year after year, is why, for me, it doesn’t matter how much navel gazing Microsoft does, I no longer care.
LOL, not a problem, you're not alone. I've noticed that since the advent of Win10, any time I post a Microsoft/Windows thread, it draws stories of suffering and woe, almost regardless of thread topic.
I use Win10 daily (also Linux and MacOS) and have tamed it enough that I don't mind it any more than the others. But it would be unpleasant if it were my -sole- available environment.
I was a highly productive SQL Server guru for 20 years, and this pain is familiar. No more working with Windows-centric IT any more. No more running Windows shops or architecting Windows-centric solutions. Maybe I might write SQL queries or architect a data model or debug data engineering, that's it.
As a side effect of being a consultant and a researcher I had to juggle a lot of distinct configurations. I used HYPER-V for my personal workstation for a while, but they played favorites with vendors and made it untenable without 100x my desired spend. So I just gave up and went KVM without the special sauce vendor software. I give customers my outside mail and API surfaces and decline to integrate in their Office/365 groupware solutions.