Outlook is trying to retrieve data from Microsoft Exchange

Question

Some of my users on my network keep getting a pop up message saying "Outlook is trying to retrieve data from Microsoft Exchange". Microsoft Office 2003 is installed on these computers and when this message appears it freezes every users outlook. I have read some articles, and they say it a problem with 2002 and 2003 version of outlook. So I have changed some users Office to MS Office 2007 but still I have the same problem. This is become a big problem as it is happening often and users are getting annoyed.

If anyone can give me some advise on how to solve this problem and what could be causing this problem I would be most grateful.

Answer 1

It could be several things, but I very much doubt it's Office/Outlook that's at fault though. Here's some food for thought, and if you have any more information in response to this please edit your original question.

Is it the same set of users, or randomly different ones? Do the users have anything in common, such as they are all on the same Mailbox Database? Do you have any "heavy" jobs running on that mailbox database (backup, archiving software, scheduled virus scan etc)?

Have you got any backups running at the time the messages are happening (it's more likely to happen on a full backup, but transaction logs may do it too)?

Are the users in cached mode? This message can be seen often if users have a large mailbox and are in "online" mode.

What's the load on the Exchange server? If it can't keep up, you'll probably see this message while it tries to plough through all the work it has to do.