FYI: New Version of Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer Released (ExRCA) with new Exchange Web Service Tests!

  • Article

From the Exchange Team blog:

“Today we released an updated version of the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer. For those of you not familiar with this site, it is a Web-based tool that helps you troubleshoot connectivity issues. The tool simulates several client logon and mail flow scenarios. When a test fails, many of the errors have troubleshooting tips to assist you in correcting the problem. For more information, see our previous blog post here.

…

Additional tests

  • Exchange Web Services - This allows you to perform connectivity testing for Exchange Web Services client such as Entourage. Developers can also use the Service Account Verification test to ensure things are configured and working properly for access with an alternate account or Exchange Impersonation.”

Brad Hughes came up with this awesome tool and I’ve been working with him to add these EWS tests to ExRCA.  There are two basic tests that you can do at this time with Exchange Web Services: 1) Test the ability of an account to perform basic Exchange Web Services tasks like Synchronization, Notification, Availability, and OOF or 2) Test the ability of a service account to access a mailbox through delegate access or Exchange Impersonation.  The first set of tests may be more useful to Exchange Administrators testing for Entourage client connectivity and as well as Availability and OOF which are used by Outlook too.  The Service Account Access test is a quick way to test and diagnose issues with service accounts accessing other mailboxes.

image

 

Both of these tests should be run against a test mailbox with an empty Inbox and Calendar folder because they will attempt to create and delete test items.  During the execution of the test ExRCA looks to ensure the Calendar and Inbox of the specified mailbox are empty before running.