Office 365 / Windows 7 / Office 2016

Question

Office 365 / Windows 7 / Office 2016

Anser Leon 41

Hi, I got a unique setup that I have been starting to experience some issues and I need y'all feedback.

I have a specific customer with a group of computers on Windows 7 / Office 2016 Standard / Office 365 email accounts. We have been in the process of upgrading the Windows 7 computers to Windows 10 slowly.

However, two weeks ago or so I started to experience an issue on the remaining Windows 7 computers. Outlook 2016 would no longer connect to Office 365.

M team has done all of the proper troubleshooting and all of the DNS records are in place. Even Windows 10 computers with the same version of Office 2016 connect fine to Office 365.

According to our research we have not found any update, warning that would prevent an Outlook 2016 on a Windows 7 computer to connect to Office 365.

Does anyone know if this is Office 365 rejecting the OS ? Are there any KB or alerts put out by Microsoft advising the compatibility issues ?

Can anyone point me to the right direction ?

Robinson, Wesley 11 Reputation points

2021-07-15T03:29:31.36+00:00

I am seeing the same issue, all on Windows 7 machines, that started about 2-3 weeks ago. It started out that Outlook was saying that it wasn't activated and when trying to activate it would give a message that we cannot connect to your account at this time, please try again later. Since then if a Windows 7 user resets their AD password, they can no longer connect to Outlook 2016. They get prompted for credentials over and over again. In all cases, each user is able to connect to OWA. We have over a dozen cases currently.
Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator

2021-07-20T10:10:12.397+00:00

Hi @Anser Leon ,

It has been a few days and I am checking to see how things are going on with the issue you are encountering? Have you had a chance to try the registry method at your end and see how it goes?
Robinson, Wesley 11 Reputation points

2021-07-22T21:45:53.713+00:00

Microsoft stopped supporting TLS1.0 a while back but apparently just recently started enforcing it. By default in Windows 7, TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are not enabled. We were able to fix the issue by enabling both of these.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/update-to-enable-tls-1-1-and-tls-1-2-as-default-secure-protocols-in-winhttp-in-windows-c4bd73d2-31d7-761e-0178-11268bb10392#easy
Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator

2021-07-25T00:36:28.473+00:00

Hi @Robinson, Wesley ,

By default in Windows 7, TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are not enabled. We were able to fix the issue by enabling both of these.

Great to know that you've sorted it out and thanks for the sharing!

Hi @Anser Leon ,

If you are still encountering this issue, you can refer to the solution shared above by Robinson and see if it can work for you as well.

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Robinson, Wesley 11 Reputation points

2021-07-15T03:29:31.36+00:00

I am seeing the same issue, all on Windows 7 machines, that started about 2-3 weeks ago. It started out that Outlook was saying that it wasn't activated and when trying to activate it would give a message that we cannot connect to your account at this time, please try again later. Since then if a Windows 7 user resets their AD password, they can no longer connect to Outlook 2016. They get prompted for credentials over and over again. In all cases, each user is able to connect to OWA. We have over a dozen cases currently.
Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator

2021-07-20T10:10:12.397+00:00

Hi @Anser Leon ,

It has been a few days and I am checking to see how things are going on with the issue you are encountering? Have you had a chance to try the registry method at your end and see how it goes?
Robinson, Wesley 11 Reputation points

2021-07-22T21:45:53.713+00:00

Microsoft stopped supporting TLS1.0 a while back but apparently just recently started enforcing it. By default in Windows 7, TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are not enabled. We were able to fix the issue by enabling both of these.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/update-to-enable-tls-1-1-and-tls-1-2-as-default-secure-protocols-in-winhttp-in-windows-c4bd73d2-31d7-761e-0178-11268bb10392#easy
Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator

2021-07-25T00:36:28.473+00:00

Hi @Robinson, Wesley ,

By default in Windows 7, TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are not enabled. We were able to fix the issue by enabling both of these.

Great to know that you've sorted it out and thanks for the sharing!

Hi @Anser Leon ,

If you are still encountering this issue, you can refer to the solution shared above by Robinson and see if it can work for you as well.

If an Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Answer 1

Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Moderator

Hi @Anser Leon ,

Does anyone know if this is Office 365 rejecting the OS ? Are there any KB or alerts put out by Microsoft advising the compatibility issues ?

I tried searching a lot but didn't see any official article explicitily stating the supportability of Office 365 services with Windows 7. According to this document, currently it's supported for Office 2016 to connect to Office 365 services include Exchange Online. And this article mentions that "Non-subscription versions of Office used by organizations, such as Office Professional Plus 2016 or Office Standard 2013, will continue to be supported(on Windows 7) based on the Fixed Lifecycle Policy. ", so my understanding is that it's still supported to connect to Exchange online account on Outlook 2016 running on Win7.

However, two weeks ago or so I started to experience an issue on the remaining Windows 7 computers. Outlook 2016 would no longer connect to Office 365.

Considering that it's a recently occurred issue, may I know if any change was made on the Windows 7 machines right before this issue started?

Besides, based on my experience, please try testing on one of the affected maichine by adding the registry key below and see if it can help:
Important: Follow the steps in this section carefully. Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.

Registry key: HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\EnableADAL
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0

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Robinson, Wesley 11 Reputation points

2021-07-15T13:56:28.937+00:00

In my case there hasn't been any changes to these windows 7 machines. I have looked for this registry key and it was present and the value set to 1. We changed the value to 0 and tried relaunching Outlook and was immediately prompted for the users credentials. After entering the credentials, the user was continuously prompted again and again just as they were before.
Robinson, Wesley 11 Reputation points

2021-07-18T16:23:20.67+00:00

Microsoft released Friday:

Incident information
Title: Some Exchange Online and hybrid Exchange Online users were unable to sign in to the service from any connection method
ID: EX268014
Status: Service Restored

Title: Some Exchange Online and hybrid Exchange Online users were unable to sign in to the service from any connection method

User Impact: Users were unable to sign in to Exchange Online from any connection method.

More info: This issue was specific to Exchange Online and hybrid Exchange users hosted on infrastructure in North and West Europe, as well as East United States.

Final status: We've confirmed the deployed fix has completely saturated within the infrastructure and determined impact has been remediated after monitoring the environment.

Scope of impact: This issue impacted a subset of Exchange Online and hybrid Exchange Online users hosted on infrastructure in North and West Europe, as well as East United States, whose mailboxes were unable to be detected correctly by the AutoDetect service.

Start time: Tuesday, June 22, 2021, at 7:00 AM UTC
End time: Wednesday, July 14, 2021, at 3:00 PM UTC

Root cause: A code regression during a platform migration resulted in our AutoDetect system to perform protocol actions, overloading Domain Name System (DNS) queries and causing requests to timeout.

We were hoping that this was related to the issue that we are seeing, but after testing with multiple users, they are still getting the repeated prompt for credentials as before. Is anyone else still seeing these issues?
Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator

2021-07-20T10:08:52.837+00:00

Hi @Robinson, Wesley ,

If there are any machines running a different version of Windows OS like Windows 10, could you please have a check to see if you are able to configure a same account in Outlook 2016 running on one of those machines?
Paul Iverson 0 Reputation points

2023-06-13T19:50:11.74+00:00

It's a simple question--does 365 work with Windows 7?

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Office 365 / Windows 7 / Office 2016

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