MS Outlook doesn’t feel like printing

I just ran into this issue w/ one of my users and, though the fix is an easy one, it took me forever to figure it out so I figured I’d better write it down…

I spent some time on our Exchange Server a week or so ago to apply an assortment of updates and, in the process, restarted the server. Everything went fine – system came up OK and all of our Mac users (Outlook 2011) had no trouble. But our Windows users (Windows 7 / Outlook 2007) suddenly couldn’t print!

Obviously, there had to be a correlation of some sort, but it didn’t make sense that a server reboot would affect the client’s ability to print (especially since our Exchange Server does not also serve as a print server). Long story short: it turns out that the Microsoft Exchange Address Book service, which is set to auto-start, failed to do so. So I manually fired it up and voilà – printing restored.

Now why this matters is still beyond me, as our systems are all configured to point directly to a print server. But I’ve long since learned not to look for commonsense explanations when it comes to Microsoft’s inner workings, so whatever.

Thanks to this article on Vinny4Tech for helping me figure this one out.