Autodiscover Connection Failure for Exchange 2007/Outlook 2007

The users for one of my clients started com­plain­ing about not being able to use the Out of Office Assis­tant for Out­look 2007. They recently upgraded to Office 2007 from Office XP. This was after they upgraded to Exchange 2007 about 6 months prior. I did not do the ini­tial setup for Exchange 2007 and the other server upgrades, but I’ve been com­ing in now and again to cleanup problems.

Ini­tially, the prob­lem was the autodis­cover URL was not acces­si­ble. That was an easy fix by adding a DNS entry. The tough nut to crack, how­ever, was a 401 error. I went through the usual sus­pects of dis­abling the loop­back check, set­ting back-connection host names, etc. None of which had an effect. It wasn’t until I tried log­ging into Remote Web Work­place directly did I get a huge clue:

This user account does not have per­mis­sions to access your net­work remotely. Con­tact your net­work admin­is­tra­tor to enable remote access for this user account.

That was a very strange error indeed since users could access all other resources includ­ing Out­look Web Access. I finally decided to look through Active Direc­tory, specif­i­cally the Win­dows SBS Remote Web Work­place Users secu­rity group. As soon as I added the main user group that con­tained all users, every­thing started to work.