Inventorying Cached Mode

During a deployment project of Outlook (when we migrated away from Lotus Notes) we needed to enable Online Mode in some cases because smaller sites had their WAN connections killed when cached mode was enabled. This was good at the time because people could be up and running quickly but now several years later it's a pain because people complain their Outlook is slow.

I want to detect a way if cached mode is enabled or not (remotely or through an inventory tool) so we can address each one.  I know we can apply a GPO to apply this but I'd rather see how bad the problem is to see if applying a GPO would cause bigger problems.

I have already seen this article (and others like it) but it didn't help because the regkeys weren't the same: http://learn-powershell.net/2012/08/03/finding-the-cachedmode-setting-in-outlook-2010-using-powershell/. We cannot use the exchange logs because my vendor says it only shows users and not computers (some computers, like RDS, need to be in online mode).

Does anyone else have a good idea or method of detecting this locally on the PC?

July 24th, 2015 10:11am
Ask your vendor if "Get-LogonStatistics" cmdlet available on their exchange. If no you have to play with Registry keys anyway. System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager is a good product to do it but I assume you don't have it deployed.
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July 24th, 2015 11:47am

Hi,

Just checking in to see if the information was helpful. Please let us know if you would like further assistance.

Regards,

Melon Chen

Forum Support

July 26th, 2015 11:20pm

We do have SCCM 2012 R2 but there isn't any build in methods to detect this option (and the script I have shared doesn't work properly in my environment).

I will ask my vendor if the command recommended will give me the Online/Cached Mode information that I need.

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July 27th, 2015 3:55am
As far as I know cmdlet that I provided probably can work with Exchange 2010 or 2013 (before CU5). Here is my notes that may help http://blog.fedenko.info/2015/05/sc-2012-r2-cm-ie11-local-intranet-zone.html I used SC to check registry settings (compliance) on client workstations via Configuration Baseline and Configuration Items. I hope it will help as well https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/gg682153.aspx
July 27th, 2015 4:20am

Cheers. My problem is that I don't know what registry settings to look for.

The article that I provided highlighted some reg entries but when I look on my clients they are not there... So they must be stored somewhere else.

Do you have any ideas where I can look on the client to see if Cached Mode is enabled or disabled?

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July 27th, 2015 4:28am
Interesting case. I tried to locate registry settings on my workstation and couldn't find it as well. I run process monitor and changed mode of outlook. I noticed HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Cached Mode - NAME NOT FOUND event in process monitor. I can successfully change mode but it doesn't save any changes to registry. I looked at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/982697 and found more interesting note - If the Cached Mode key does not exist, create this key by following these steps. It looks like this configuration is also stored somewhere else internally by design, probably in profile. You can also ask your vendor to look at this article http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/28446.exchange-determining-the-list-of-users-connected-in-outlook-onlinecached-mode.aspx I hope it helps.
July 27th, 2015 9:28am

Hello Tom,

Do you have any update?

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July 30th, 2015 9:21am

Hi, thanks for checking up.

I have got exports from my vendor but they don't contain information about which users are using cached vs. online mode. 

The Get-LogonStatistics command at the bottom of the article sadly only returned the following for each account:

ClientMode = ExchangeServer
ClientName = <name of exchange server>

The EXMON tool also returned results which I couldn't use :( for a single account it returned four IP addresses

Client IP Addresses
158.<exchange server 1> 158.<exchange server 3> 158.<exchange server 2>  158.<exchange server 4>

He also told me that they could only do this for Exchange on-prem and we actually have a mix of both Office 365 and Exchange on-prem (which I didn't take into account).

With this in mind I think one of the only options I have is to query the client (script/SCCM etc) or deploy the cached setting out with the risk it might cause a lot of clients to do a lot of downloading...

I am still open for ideas :)
July 30th, 2015 10:07am

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