Issue with Microsoft Outlook 2013 reconfiguring on every launch – XenDesktop / XenApp

In one of the recent XenDesktop 7 deployments, I was told that Outlook 2013 doesn’t launch well on Server 2012 Hosted Shared Catalogs by one of the end users.  Every time Outlook is started, it tries to reconfigure itself as if the Outlook profile isn’t there or it cant find the profile. This caused the Outlook plugins or add ins to fail giving errors. My customer setup was below

• Outlook 2013 Professional Plus
• XenDesktop 7.0
• Server 2012 Hosted Shared Catalogs with Desktops and Apps

Resolution – I came across a Microsoft blog which was talking about how important “Windows Search” Service is for the full functionality of Outlook. I decided to give that a try and started the service and viola, the issue is gone and Outlook launches way faster after that.

 

This might be the same case for older versions of Outlook  and other XenApp versions. i haven’t tested them yet so cant comment.