Reply/forward buttons stop working in OWA - O365 environment.

msteinhilbermsteinhilber Member Posts: 1,480 ■■■■■■■■□□
I'm hoping some of the more veteran Exchange admins can chime in as to if this is something they have run into before. We migrated to hosted e-mail through Microsoft back in June. We're using a mix of O365 and Exchange Online licenses, the majority of our users being on Exchange Online and most of them using OWA.

Many of our OWA users are reporting issues where the reply, reply all and forward buttons gray out and are unusable unless they logout and login again - they can still navigate to other apps like their contacts, tasks or to other mail folders just fine when the reply/forward buttons stop working. It isn't related to any timeout periods, it can occur within 5 minutes of logging in to OWA or a hour or so later. We've been tracking it and have a fairly equal distribution of IE, Firefox and Chrome users experiencing the issue in Vista, Win7 and Win8. We initially focused mostly on the end users system before the reports of the issue really started coming in more frequently and they've largely been free of malware and running up to date browsers. We've coincidentally been replacing workstations for our branch office receptionists and have had reports from receptionists previously having the issue continue to have the issue on a brand new system so we know they're clean.

I thought I'd ask here if anyone has run into this because I've had an open ticket with Microsoft since 7/6 and no resolution yet, last I heard is they were escalating it on 7/16 but haven't heard back yet. I've been supplying them with a list of users running into the issue along with dates and times it occurred along with the OS and browser in use. Admittedly, our users are the sort where most probably don't even report the issue so if 50 report it we can assume at least several hundred or more are having it. Then we're lucky of of the 50 who report it actually work with us by giving us info to pass on to Microsoft in an effort to fix it. So I've only been able to get around 10 users to consistently give me times it's happened and despite the small sample size, there does seem to be a trend where they all report it happening within 15-20 minute windows which would make sense if something is happening behind the scenes that's causing it since they wouldn't notice it until they go to reply or forward something.

On Friday I setup Fiddler on two workstations where my users seem to consistently experience this throughout the day. So I do have a couple Fiddler traces I can pass on to Microsoft to see if it provides any help in troubleshooting this. I'm about out of ideas though and the lack of communication from Microsoft is becoming frustrating. This hasn't been a very popular transition for many of our users since they just hate change and learning anything new. Some are starting to come around now that they recognize all the benefits of Exchange over our old system, MDaemon. But this particular issue is proving to make my life miserable as I keep getting users screaming about how big of a pain it is. Is this common with OWA? We're a real estate firm so it's largely BYOD device here and many of our agents just don't have Outlook and being that they're essentially private contractors we don't supply it for them so OWA it is.

Comments

  • markulousmarkulous Member Posts: 2,394 ■■■■■■■■□□
    Welcome to Microsoft support. Best thing you can do is get on the phone every day and bug the crap out of them. If you don't, it'll take months to resolve.
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