Laptop suddenly cannot access Outlook from one WiFi location

Question

I am using a Lenovo laptop which has been set up with Outlook 2010 for nearly a year without any problems. I use it to work from both my home and my office, and both are set up with Wi-Fi.

When I arrived at the office yesterday and tried to open Outlook, it remained on the load screen and prompted me with a "The server is unavailable. Try again?" error. I can still browse the internet and use every other one of the applications on my computer.

When I returned home that night and tried to open Outlook, it worked perfectly again.

Upon my arrival at work today Outlook has once again stopped working and will not open.I can still access my account via the Outlook Web App on other computers in the office, but the Web App as well as Outlook itself will not open specifically on my laptop even though I have an internet connection.

This is particularly bizarre because my account was set up at the office, for the office.

Can someone please tell what on earth is going on?

Answer 1

As an avenue of investigation, I would suggest the following:

1. If your laptop is powered up when you arrive at the office, try re-booting to ensure that all of the connection processes are re-initialized.
2. Try disabling add-ins, as some of them might be causing the start-up process to time out or fail to complete. In my own experience, the Norton Security add-in had to be disabled because it caused this problem.

Go.You can find more detail on disabling Outlook 2010 add-ins at http://www.addictivetips.com/microsoft-office/how-to-disable-remove-outlook-2010-add-in/

From that page:

There are hundreds of third-party addons available on web, some work seamlessly with Outlook 2010 while others can raise compatibility issues or cause deadlocks. This post covers how to disable/remove the Outlook 2010 add-in. To remove Outlook add-in, on File menu, click Options. It will open up Outlook Options dialog. From left sidebar, click Add-Ins. From main window, select an add-in and from bottom of window click Go.

Answer 2

Have you perhaps changed the DNS server on your laptop?

For example, we had an exchange server with the internal dns name exchange.example.local. Externally, we would use exchange.example.com with the proper port forwarding. In order for the email clients to work both internally and externally, we setup so our internal DNS servers had a CNAME for exchange.example.com that pointed to exchange.example.local.

If you use a different DNS server, it will provide the external IP of the mail server, and most likely the company firewall doesn't allow connections from the inside to connect to the external interface of it.

Answer 3

I suggest trying to start Outlook in safe mode, by holding the Ctrl button. If it works in safe mode, it's probably one of the add-ins.