Installing Office 2011 H&S breaks my Outlook 2011 exchange server connection

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Hi everybody!

My first post on Mac Forums so please be gentle, especially as this might get a bit long for a first post. ;)

I've got an odd problem with the installation of Office 2011 on my Mac Mini. It goes as follows:

Mac Mini - i5, late 2012, Yosemite fully updated.

I have a licensed copy of Outlook 2011 which is provided by the company I use for my Exchange mailbox (Fasthosts in the UK, running on Exchange 2013). There is no license key for that product as it is supposedly "locked" for use with my email account only. I installed it on my clean install of Yosemite and it auto-connected just fine and synchronised with my Exchange email account fully without problem.

Once that was working, I then installed Office 2011 Home & Student to get Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Unfortunately, there is also an unwanted and un-advertised "trial' version of Outlook 2011 included which seems to mess-up the Exchange Server connection. I guess it's replacing some essential info somewhere, but there's no option NOT to install the Outlook trial and I can't reconfigure Outlook at all to make it work. (Tried deleting account and recreating, but it didn't help).

I deleted Office thoroughly and tried installing Office first and then my licensed copy of Outlook, but I just get the message that I need to upgrade the Office package to make Outlook work.

I've gone round in circles trying different things and still end up with a non-working Outlook.

Does anybody have a clue how I might either fix (or identify) the info that is being trashed.
or
Any idea how I can tweak the installation of Office 2011 to forget about installing the unwanted trial version of Outlook?

Many thanks for reading all of that!
Best regards,
Paul.
 

chscag

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MS Office 2011 Home and Student does include an optional install trial version of Outlook 2011, however, the installation routine as far as I know does not install it unless you choose to do so. That's with the version purchased here in the US as it may be different for UK purchasers.

Did you use the Microsoft recommended uninstall routine or did you just drag the MS Office components to the trash? The Microsoft uninstall routine can be found here. Unless Office is correctly uninstalled it will leave behind the serial number and activation code which will cause the problem you ran into with reinstalling your already activated copy of Outlook 2011.
 
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Hi CHSCAG - thanks for taking the time to reply.

My UK version of Office 2011 just goes straight in to the installation of all the product suite including the Outlook 2011 trial version.

I used the Microsoft recommended clean-up and Outlook installed and worked perfectly again right up until the point when I got brave and tried the Office installation once more after which it was permanently asking for username & password when the server rejected the connection.

Throughout this, Apple Mail has had no problems connecting to the Exchange Server so the issue definitely points towards the Microsoft installations.

Here's a bullet point list of my situation:

* First, Apple Mail works fine and is connecting to Exchange beautifully with no interruptions or issues I can see. This indicates that it's probably not an Exchange Server issue or a network issue.

* My Windows PC connects to the Exchange Server reliably on the same network, so no apparent network problems.

* Outlook 2011 connects to Exchange Server and works fine after a full removal of Office files and clean installation.

* Installing Office 2011 H&S breaks my Outlook connection settings PERMANENTLY causing the prompt for username & password to appear every time Outlook runs. This is not an intermittent thing - no connection to Exchange is possible after Office H&S has been installed.

* Apple Mail continues to work flawlessly even when Outlook doesn't connect.

* Installing Office 2011 before Outlook doesn't work because Office asks for the Outlook license key (which I don't have/need - see original post) thinking that I'm trying to upgrade Office from H&S to Home & Business.

Thanks again for trying to help with this issue.
Regards,
Paul.
 

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