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Julien Vehent
Asked: 2011-03-09 11:24:15 +0800 CST

Automate configuration change on Outlook 2007

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I am migrating a bunch of mailboxes to google apps. Each user owns several mailboxes each serving different domains (john has [email protected], [email protected], and so on...)

Currently, those accounts are hosted on (edit:NOT an exchange server) an old SMTP/POP server we want to replace, and I need to edit their outlook 2007 configuration to change the pop, smtp and password parameters.

The hard way to do it is to connect to each outlook session and edit the parameters manually. I want to avoid that. Because that represents over 700 accounts spread between 40 users... :'(

How can I automate this configuration change ? In the active directory ? Using a PRF file ?

note: I'm a linux sysadmin with very little knowledge of windows's black magic.

windows-server-2003 email outlook outlook-2007

2 Answers

  1. If your users are using Outlook as an Exchange client, which really is how they should be using it if they have an Exchange server, then moving to POP3/SMTP requires a complete reconfiguration of Outlook; they will also be in for some really nasty surprise if they are used to sharing calendars and do some of the other many things that Exchange supports.

    Anyway, I'm not here to question your choices... but moving Outlook from being an Exchange client to plain POP3/SMTP automatically for all your users is definitely not trivial. Something can probably be achieved using .PRF files, but this is neither trivial, too.

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  2. You are asking too much from Outlook. No there isn't an easy way of doing that. Not to mention even if you could easily modify the Outlook config file to point to another server, (POP3 and Exchange both act completely different in regards to Outlook. Cached Exchange mode doesn't use a PST all of the time, sometimes it is an OST instead, and POP3 always uses PST.)

    Let's just say that you could do it, wouldn't you have to edit each user's config file, not saving you from having to touch each machine.

    From a 10,000 foot view, I'm going to say you are making a mistake. All of your user's mailboxes are stored on one nice neat little box that can easily be backed up. Once you migrate all of them over to google, you depend on each user to back up their own mail contacts etc.

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