Exchange 2010 Testing the OPTIONS command failed – Activesync:

Last week we deployed a new Microsoft Exchange 2010 Server on a Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controller (We know! it’s not recommended but due to the client’s budget constraints we had to do it and it worked just fine). We purchased and installed an SSL certificate on IIS 7 for OWA. We created a redirecting script to re-direct http://webmail.domain.com to http://webmail.domain.com/OWA so people would have a shorter link to type to take them to OWA.

While testing Exchange ActiveSync with “Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer” https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com everything passed except one section that gave us errors similar to the following:

ExRCA is testing Exchange ActiveSync.
….
Exchange 2010 Testing the OPTIONS command failed – Activesync:
Attempting an ActiveSync session with server
Errors were encountered while testing the ActiveSync session
Test Steps
Attempting to send OPTIONS command to server
Testing the OPTIONS command failed. See Additional Details for more info
Additional Details
A Web Exception occurred because an HTTP 401 – Unauthorized response was received from IIS7
….
an HTTP 403 has occurred

After further troubleshooting it turned out that these were self-inflected wounds ;-).

Two reasons:

1- The re-directing script played a role.

2- We were using the Domain Admin account in the “Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer” to test. When we tried a different domain user account, it all passed flawlessly! 

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