As an IT admin it will happen to all of us at some point; there will be that problem that seems like you are 10 minutes away from fixing that quickly turns into 10 hours and then 2, 3, even 5+ days.  Before you know it, you have spent a week with nearly zero sleep and a lot of caffeine and then you finally realize that you are not any further along than when you started.  I spent the last week banging my head up against a wall trying to get a clients new Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 SP1 environment up and running, only to find out that Microsoft has a crippling bug in Windows Server 2008 that won’t allow Outlook Anywhere (a.k.a. RPC over HTTP) to run in its default configuration.

The most unfortunate part about this is that Microsoft is still yet to release any information publicly about this problem, which is really sad because they generally do such a great job of at least posting limitations of their products on many of their wonderful blogs.  I had to search the Internet and eventually found articles that led me in the right direction but I was never able to find a blog/article that outlined the exact steps that I used to fix/diagnose Outlook Anywhere which is why I really felt the need to write this post.

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