Netadmin: Outlook Servername Autofill

Well, I haven't found an answer to exactly how Outlook 2007 queries for the mailbox servername, but I did find that that you can use an Exchange Profile Creator tool to "autoconfigure" the servername in earlier versions of Outlook - it's a bit of a hack, but appears to get the job done.

Back to Outlook 2007... Since I couldn't find any code or a KB article on how it works, I'll take a stab at it... During setup Outlook already knows the username and domain name that the workstation is joined to. From there, the client can query the GC, get a list of Exchange servers, and then query the list of mailboxes on each for the one that houses the mailbox that client needs access to. But that might take a while, and the during Outlook's setup it autofilled instantly. So maybe there's an attribute in Active Directory that we could use use an LDAP query to grab the server name from for the individual user account. That would certainly be a lot quicker than my first thought. If I have a chance to dig a bit deeper, I'll let you know what I find.