Office Document Connection Entourage Excel Outlook PowerPoint Word Exchange Autodiscover workaround for Advanced Settings

Autodiscover in Outlook is a big improvement when creating our account settings. If  your company’s DNS settings for Autodiscover is not set correctly, Autodiscover will reset your custom settings under Advanced Settings. When this happens Outlook will fail to connect.
For example, a user reported the following:

I set the Exchange Server to be: https://mail.microautomation.com
and after it connects, the URL changes to: https://mail.microaut.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

The fact that this is happening implies that the Autodiscover response for this user’s server is incorrect. However, there is a workaround using Applescript. Once Outlook is running,  launch the AppleScript Editor and run the following script:

tell application "Microsoft Outlook"
set background autodiscover of exchange account "NameOfAccount" to false
end tell

Replace “NameOfAccount” with the actual name of the account. Once this is run, Outlook should no longer replace the server URL.
NameOfAccount would equal the Account Description field in your Exchange account’s settings.
We were experiencing this issue, but I am now using a couple of Apple Scripts to manage this. They’ve been working so far.
**To disable autodiscover**
tell application “Microsoft Outlook”
set background autodiscover of every Exchange account to false
end tell
**To enable autodiscover**
tell application “Microsoft Outlook”
set background autodiscover of every Exchange account to true
end tell
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