Oh yeah? How about this for fun...two hospitals merge, call them A and B. Corporate compliance officer comes to hospital B. She uses a computer joined to a domain in hospital B (so she gets all the drive mappings at hospital B). She wants Outlook to connect to hospital's A Exchange server WHILE she is logged into hospital's B domain! Hospital A's exchange server won't accept cross authentication. Citrix is out, because she wants to use her PDA locally to sync with Outlook.

My solution? A RunAs script which launches the hot sync manager and Outlook under hospital A's credentials while she is really logged into hospital B's domain!

Hacky tacky, but it worked.

I hope a _lot_ changes in the next version of Outlook. There are so many ways in which Outlook shows signs that its developers don't use it in anything outside of a single scenario - that of a single organisation working out of a locally-managed Exchange server. (i.e. the way Microsoft uses it)

Trying to use Outlook to access a POP account has been irritating beyond belief. I still can't believe that they haven't resolved the issue of "interrupted POP session => dozens of duplicated messages".

Have you tried using Outlook profiles. I have not done this but I have to think that a profile for each org. would work. I am sure you cannot connect to 2 orgs. concurrently but this may help you along.

You can configure Outlook to prompt for which profile to use when it starts.

bill

You could always switch to Lotus Notes which for all its interface quirks demolishes Outlook when it comes to connectivity / replication to multiple information stores (wether email, document, database, discussion etc).

ADAM: Use profiles and set the profile for the Hosp A connection to always prompt for username and password.

I currently have the outlook instance on my machine set up with at least 10 different profiles that hook into 10 different Exchange Orgs, some that trust the Domain/Account I am using interactively, some that don't.

I agree with Dana though that Outlook should be able to use multiple Exchange ORGs simultaneously. That pops up all sorts of questions about Address Book resolution, etc but those can all be answered.

Even more than multi-ORG support though I would like to see outlook use LDAP for Exchange Org AB resolution. Dump NSPI, it is a big pain in the ass both for managing DLs/users from within Outlook but also is a huge pain in the ass from a troubleshooting standpoint.

The AD and Exchange DEV folks made it too easy for the Outlook folks to sit back and not do anything to fix any of that by crutching that shitty mechanism.

joe

About 3 years ago, my team actually started digging down into the core of the MAPI stack for a stillborn feature in our web-based VPN portal. What we found was really ugly. We eventually ran into exactly this issue, called PSS, and got back a "sorry, you're out of luck". The whole subsystem is a pain in the ass, though; not Microsoft's best software engineering.

I guess they architected in an assumption that there would only be one active MAPI profile/client at a time.

I made the same exact complain in December.

http://www.slashstar.com/blogs/tim/archive/2005/12/19/WhyDoesOutlookSupportOnlyOneExchangeServer.aspx

It's really, really frustrating, especially with RPC over HTTP/S which really ENABLES you to use more than one concurrently.

Sadly, it is not (yet) fixed in Outlook 12. I've asked if there are but haven't gotten a concrete answer. Judging from Steve's comment above though, it won't unless they've done some drastic refactoring.