Connect Outlook 2010 from a Exchange Account from a different domain

Question

I'll try to be clearest as possible as I think this is not a usual situation. If you need more details, please say it.

I work on a company that has an Exchange Server. They provide a laptop which is on company domain and I can connect in Outlook just fine with my company e-mail. If I go home with my company laptop I can connect via VPN to company domain and connect to Outlook just fine as well.

We have a webmail which we can use in ANY untrusted computer on browser, something like webmail.mycompany.com and I just need to put my username and password to connect.

I also have an Android smartphone which is not on domain as well and I can configure it to connect to my company Exchange mail.

However I work on a remote server which is not on company domain (I can't change the domain on the remote server) and I'm trying to configure Outlook on the remote server unsuccessfully...

I'm very confused and wondering:

1. If I can connect via VPN to my company Exchange mail on Outlook anywhere as long as I have internet access on my company laptop

2. I can connect to my company Exchange mail on a webmail on browser on any computer (not on company domain) providing username and password.

3. I can connect to my company Exchange mail on my Android smartphone (not on company domain) by providing the Exchange mail server, username, domain and password.

Question: Is it possible to connect to Outlook in a different domain on a remote server with the information I have?

Thank you!

Answer 1

If an Exchange server is published correctly with ActiveSync enabled, then an device that supports ActiveSync should be able to connect to it. I am contracted out to 4 partner organisations during the week, 1 orgs email is Exchange Online, the others are local exchanges, one each of 2007, 2010, 2013.

I can easily hook up my email accounts to each of these from my phones, outlook 2010 at home (not connected to the domain or VPN) and outlook 2013 in the office (that is domain connected). (For 2 of these orgs my first job was to correctly publish their exchange farm for their employees)

You mentioned a VPN tunnel, if you have to establish a VPN to connect to the exchange then it sounds like it has not been correctly published externally, possibly by design.

1. The first thing you should do is talk to your Exchange Admin and ask them to confirm or publish the Autodiscover and ActiveSync related services for the exchange you wish to connect to externally, it's quite secure by default and has been designed to be used in this way so you shouldn't get much resistance on this front.
2. If you are the admin, or just playing along at home, then your next stop should be the Microsoft Connectivity Analyzer https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com , previously testexchangeconnectivity.com... that uses the same protocols that outlook and mobile devices use to connect to MS Exchange, this includes Exchange Online.
3. If the connectivity analyzer can connect, but your client can't then download the client analyzer from the "client" tab in the connectivity analyzer site. The error prompts are really informative and help to improve your understanding of how the Exchange platform works

Outlook 2010 can only add one domain connected Exchange service at a time, but it can have many activeSync compatible services connected no worries at all. Follow the test results on the connectivity analyzer site described above for guidance, the two most common issues that I come across are:

1. You primary email alias may not match the autodiscover service. For instance user@email.com might belong to an exchange that is published as 'electronicemail.com' In this case you need to make sure you connect to the exchange service as 'user@electronicemail.com' your default replay to address as configured in exchange will still work as user@email.com, but outlook doesn't know about these details untile after it has established a connection to the exchange server via the autodiscover service.
2. The other common issue is that the autodiscover service is not contactable externally or does not resolve correctly when you are external. (this happens a lot with Small Business Server and Essential Business server) In these cases you can sometimes make some quick edits to your c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file to direct outlook to the right server IPaddress to configure the account. If you add a hosts entry for autodiscover.yourEmailDomainName.whateveritis into your hosts file this can often get around issues caused by the organisations public DNS not being configured for exchange.

Note that the hosts solution above can work in many instances for both of these issues