known OWA bug and how to fix it

There is some incompatibility between Forefront and Outlook Web App, that is periodical and really annoying. (see screenshot of the error screen below) Luckily you just need to stop all services, disconnect Forefront from OWA, restart the services, stop them again, connect Forefront to OWA and finally start all services again. Here is the breakdown with screenshots:

OWA error:owa02

First off, on the server that runs OWA we start the Services snap-in, services.msc:

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Than we locate all the services that start with “Microsoft Exchange”:

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We stop them one by one, if a service has dependencies we will get a notification of that and we can stop them too:

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Some services take a long time to stop, be patient:

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After the first service and all of its dependencies are stopped we still have some left:

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Now that all the Exchange services are stopped, we need to stop all the Forefront services:

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Now we start a command prompt:

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Navigate to the Forefront installation directory and run “FSCUTILITY.exe /status” just to make sure that forefront is indeed enabled:

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See the last line of the output? It is integrated:

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Lets change that, simply run: “FSCUTILITY.exe /disable”. It should output something similar to this:

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Now let us start the Exchange services:

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The Forefront services will start automatically, if not leave them stopped:

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Now we re-integrate Forefront via “FSCUTILITY.exe /enable”

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And start the Forefront services if they didn’t already start automatically. Note: i didn’t start ALL the Forefront services, only the ones that where previously running:

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Because we have 2 nodes that run Exchange services, I usually like to stop the affected node entirely via the Server Manager under the Features -> Failover Cluster Management:

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Simply select the node, left click on it and select Stop:

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It will mark it as “Down”:

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And switch automatically to the other (running) node:

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