Out in the field we are often called upon to troubleshoot issues with Office 365, this can range from incorrectly configured devices to connectivity issues to heaping users who want to understand if their PC is ready to be used with the latest wave. Microsoft has recently (well back in September) provided some new tools which help with Office 365 troubleshooting. This blog post introduces the new tools, I will post some walkthroughs on how best to use these over the coming weeks.
The Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 is a relatively new troubleshooting tool you can download from Microsoft. Right now, it’s only available for users of Office 365 Business. Office 365 Home users can download and run it, but one of the last steps of the troubleshooter is to sign in with your business account. A quick check of the PC with the Office 365 Best Practices Analyzer tool often highlights a missing update or Office 365 Pre-Requisite component which is not installed. There are also some very useful troubleshooting tools available there is a section dedicated to Office 365 which allow you to perform a. Fix Outlook connection problems in Office 365 and Exchange Online. 5/25/2021; 2 minutes to read; s; M; Applies to: Exchange Online; In this article. If you're using Outlook to access your Office 365 email account or another Exchange-based email account, and you're having problems, we want to get you back to sending and receiving email as quickly as possible.
When you sign into the Office 365 portal you will now see a new menu item on the left for Tools. Below is a screen shot of the Tools that Microsoft has provided to help with analysing and troubleshooting. The screen shot below shows what’s available to you.
To introduce some of the more useful troubleshooting tools here is a brief description of how we’ve use some of these tools;
We often come across users who wish to use their existing PC to connect to an Office 365 service. If the customer in question has a plan which excludes Office 2010/2013 they often use their existing Office product to connect to Exchange and SharePoint Online. We get called when then can’t connect or access the service as expected. A quick check of the PC with the Office 365 Best Practices Analyzer tool often highlights a missing update or Office 365 Pre-Requisite component which is not installed.
There are also some very useful troubleshooting tools available https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com there is a section dedicated to Office 365 which allow you to perform a number of service wide tests from your browser. These can be useful in a variety of situations especially during a migration or shortly after when you need to test DNS records have been added correctly. Microsoft has recently updated this tool with new features, which can be used to help in identifying common connectivity issues for Outlook, Lync, and Office 365. screen shot of the tool is shown below which illustrates the tests available to you. The tool can be accessed from the client tab;
Microsoft O365 Troubleshooting Tools
Finally if you have ever had to analyse message headers to determine the origins of a message and how it made its way through one or more SMTP servers to its destination then you will now that this can be a painful experience. Fortunately help is at hand, Message Analyzer, again apart of the Remote Connectivity Analyzer tools makes reading email headers less painful.
This post should help point you in the direction of some easy to use tools which can be used as the first steps in troubleshooting Office 365 issues. The next post in this series will provide some walk throughs in using these tools, starting with Message Header Analysis.
Office 365 Troubleshooting Tool Download
Until next time……..