Outlook 2013 changes account from Office 365 to old on premise Exchange server

When you have a problem once and you can reset everything, it’s annoying. But usually it’s quicker than getting to the root cause of exactly why it happened. When the same problem occurs a month later, it’s time to find the root cause.In this case, my Outlook 2013 randomly decides to stop connecting to Office 365 and changes my email account settings back to our old, defunct Exchange server. The telltale sign is when Outlook refuses to connect and repeatedly prompts for my user credentials (yes I did type in my password correctly). The only way to fix it seems to be to set up a new Outlook profile and reconnect to Office 365. Talk about frustrating. We’d done all the necessary steps during the migration (including adding the correct autodiscover dns records) and had run happily for months before this issue appeared. And lucky me, it was only happening on my computer.

So the second time this happened, I researched the problem and while I can’t find anyone who’s posted the exact issue of Outlook changing randomly, this community article seems to fit. Scroll down to the post by Ognyan Y. http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/158/t/45554.aspx

And because I hate it when links go dead, here’s a copy & paste of the suggestion (all credit to the original author!). I did indeed find a service connection point (SCP) in our Active Directory for an autodiscover of our old exchange server name, which I’ve now deleted. Cross your fingers for me that this does the trick!

“I think the problem is related with the Service Connection Point (SCP) in your local Active Directory. When Outlook starts the Autodiscover process he first tries to find the Exchange servers using this SCP and if he fails then it queries the DNS for the auto discover record. If you do not plan to use the local Autodiscover you can remove the SCP from the AD.

To find the SCP open Active Directory Sites and Services, then go to View – > View Services Node. This will show the services node in the console. Then see the screen shot where to locate exactly the SCP”

-Sonia