Another issue from the new Exchange 2007 environment: permissions problems in terms of OWA setups. Basically every time one would go to our webmail OWA site, it would give a 404 error, or sometimes it would go through to authenticate but then say the session has timed out. Not good.

The quickest way to fix this is to just recreate the virtual directories. Here’s the low down on how to do just that:

1.) On your exchange server, open up the PowerShell command
2.) Type Get-OwaVirtualDirectory. This will list all of the virtual directories on any of the exchange servers currently in your domain.
3.) Type Remove-OwaVirtualDirectory -identity “owa (Default Web Site)”. This will remove the OWA directory in about 10 to 30 seconds.
4.) Type New-OwaVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion “Exchange2007” -Name “owa (Default Web Site)”. This will create the Virtual Directory again.

If you get an error saying that the IIS Virtual Directory can not be created at line:1 char:24, go into your Exchange Management Console. Under Server Configuration/Client Access make sure that Outlook Anywhere Enabled is set to FALSE for the server you’re trying to recreate the directory.

I found out on our second server that I really don’t need to type with capital letters. and since i’m lazy, i stopped typing with capital letters. thank you!