Office Support and Recovery Assistant Tool

I was just made aware of this useful tool by Microsoft Support – the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 (also known as ‘SaRA’).

Even better, it’s not just for Office 365, other Office products can be scanned using this tool such as Outlook in Office 2010, 2013 and 2016.

The article above has a step by step guide for scanning Outlook for problems. It takes a few minutes to run, but will identify a bunch of possible issues you may have. But, from the results I see, I’d say everyone should run this tool regardless!

For example, my scan came up with this as one of the issues found:

The link goes here which then goes into details about the problem. I had noticed in Outlook 2016 by default, that users had sometimes mentioned they could no longer delete items from mailboxes they only had Inbox access to, and I assumed this was a change in behavior from Outlook 2010. This tells you how to toggle that setting if you’d rather the deleted items go to the other person’s mailbox, which removes the need for the delegate to have access to someone else’s deleted items.

If I’d run this at the start of the Office 2016 deployment during testing, it would have given me a better idea of potential issues that might come up. Here’s another one:

That’s not ideal at all! Again the link goes into more detail and this one seems really important –

Since it was patched in 2010 and 2013, but 2016 needs a registry change to fix it (why would they not just change the registry value in 2016 with an update?). This is something that may never get picked up without running this utility.
I’ve now got some work ahead of me to go through the rest of the issues from my scan, do testing and hopefully improve things. I’ve only looked at the Outlook component so far, and there’s other scans I’ll also need to try. Check it out and hopefully it’ll help you too.

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