Recently we implemented Exchange 2007 Beta 2. This environment consists of two Exchange 2007 in mixed mode that includes an Exchange 2003 FE and BE. The two Exchange 2007 server roles are a FE (CAS and HTS) and a BE (Mailbox.) I implemented a SSL cert, RPC over HTTP (Outlook Anywhere) and ActiveSync. After all of these changes, OWA randomly stopped working.
The error I received was "Outlook Web Access did not initialize. An Event has been logged so that the system administrator can resolve the issue. Please contact technical support for your organization. Could not find active directory owa configuration object for virtual directory owa"
The error indicates that an event was logged, yet when you look for this event, it doesn’t appear anywhere on the CAS/HTS or Mailbox Server. So at this point I needed to find a permanent solution. Since Exchange 2007 is so new, this issue didn’t appear to be documented anywhere. So the solution I choose to take at this point was to remove the OWA virtual directory and the related active directory information. Here are the steps I followed:
Run this command on the CAS server:
remove-owavirtualdirectory –Identity “owa (Default Web Site)”
Noticed that it removes only the IIS subweb, but not the AD object. So I went in to ADSI and removed:
CN=owa (Default Web Site),CN=HTTP,CN=Protocols,CN=ServerName,CN=Servers,CN=Exchange Administrative Group(GUID),CN=Administrative Groups,CN=Organization,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=domain,DC=com
Here’s the tricky part, I had to make an assumption on the command to use to create the OWA subweb: (The help file said to use other references to exchange version, etc… but I just got more errors)
New-owavirtualdirectory –Name “owa” –website “Default Web Site” (Website is case sensitive)
Note: The above command actually produces an error stating that it already exists in AD. (Ignore the error)
It now shows up in ESM, but not IIS. Don’t create the subweb in IIS, it will break again. You have to restart IIS to get it to work properly. Last, if you had special authentication/ permissions or forms based auth, you need to enable these features again. You may have to reassign an SSL cert to this subweb again.
