Why So Much Difficulty Outlook?

OK, so today I’m taking a break from the world of Linux to focus on the world of Windows. Windows 7 to be exact, which now lives on my Toshiba L305 alongside Ubuntu (dual-boot). I’m putting 7 through the paces which for me means installing Office 2007 and setting up Outlook 2007. I have a somewhat screwy outlook 2007 setup to begin with since I run my e-mail off my own server with it’s own self-signed certificate. So I did what I felt I had to do: Exported the root certificate from another computer, started up mmc.exe on the Win7 box and added the “Certificates” snap-in (Under the Machine account) and then imported the root certificate to the “Trusted Root Certificate Authorities” folder.

So far so good. Outlook Web Access (OWA) popped up in IE without any complaining about my cert, but Outlook on the desktop (Formerly known as RPC over HTTP, now known as Outlook Anywhere) was being a pain. Luckily I found this page on Technet Social which talks about similar issues. One post mentioned formatting the username as \ which I thought was nuts as I’ve always used my e-mail address. But I tried it and…. amazingly… it worked. So that’s what it took to get Outlook setup!

Strangely enough it now always requires I use the \ format. I don’t know if this is inherent to Windows 7 or what. Not ready to rule it a bug as it may simply be I messed up something on my Exchange server since I last set up Outlook.