A Windows System Admin's Blog

Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management

Fixing the Outlook Web Access web application failed to initialize error

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During the Christmas break many still wish to check their e-mails whilst enjoying their holidays.  One of my Clients who don’t use OWA are now taking the plunge and going to be checking their e-mail (great feature). With SBS 2008 (so Exchange 2007), OWA is enabled by default, so I thought there would be nothing that I needed to do, I was wrong.

After loading up OWA on the server and my laptop I received the following error:

The Outlook Web Access web application failed to initialize.
..
Exception
Exception type: Microsoft.Exchange.Clients.Owa.Core.OwaThemeManagerInitializationException

The fix I’ve worked out for this is to copy the original files in the theme directory from your installation media (x:\Setup\ServerRoles\ClientAccess\owa\version\) back into the OWA working directory.

The cause, I suspect a corrupt file, not too sure exactly and didn’t have much time to investigate seeing as it’s holiday time, but believe something had changed the theme configuration causing OWA to look elsewhere for theme files, I also have a suspicion that an update might have caused this, but can’t confirm.

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