When viewing Public Folders in Outlook you recieve the following error, Cannot expand the folder. Microsoft Exchange is not available.

John Exchange Server, Microsoft

So there have been quite a few posts about Exchange 2010 lately, I guess it’s mainly because that has been my focus for the last few months at my current job. So here is another one regarding an error message when you try to access public folders in outlook and how to fix it.

We were receiving calls that users were unable to access their public folders (which contains our global calendar) We were able to replicate the issue on our own accounts and received the following message.

Cannot expand the folder. Microsoft Exchange is not available.
Either there are network problems or the Exchange server is down
for maintenance. (/o=First Organization/ou=Exchange
Administrative Group (DOMAIN)/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=SERVERNAME

So we quickly remoted into our server which published our Public Folders, started the public folder tool and could see them all there, also running the get-publicfolder PowerShell cmdlet ran and listed all of the available public folders.  I then decided to take a quick look at the services which were running.

Public Folders are pushed to Outlook clients via Microsoft Exhcnage RPC Client Access Service, and if stopped you are unable to browse for public folders and get the above error.  In our case we were able to simply start the Service and the Public Folders were vieable in Outlook again.  I’ve heard of some isntances where the service no longer starts, if that is the case then you may need to check on permissions in the Bin folder inside Exchange.

 

2 thoughts to “When viewing Public Folders in Outlook you recieve the following error, Cannot expand the folder. Microsoft Exchange is not available.”

  1. I have this exact issue with Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 2. However, this service is not the issue and restarting it on any of the Exchange servers doesn’t resolve the issue.

    Public folders load fine if your local on the LAN or using webmail. However, if you are connected via Outlook Anywhere that error gets generated.

    I’m concerned the latest rollup 2 for SP3 on 2010 is causing this. I’ve posted in the Exchange TechNet forums hoping for an answer.

    Reply

    1. I’ve been holding off from installing the latest and greatest in updates from Microsoft recently. There were issues with DPM roll ups, Hyper-V updates and Exchange Roll ups.

      Reply

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