How To: Manage Autodiscover for users individually using the Registry

If you are rolling out a migration for a company which is already using Autodiscover, or AutoDiscover
aware clients, in their environments, but want this to also work for the migrated users without
breaking current behaviour this can offer a challenge. That is, until you know how to release this
simple registry change to update Autodiscover on a per user basis!

 First you need an Autodiscover.xml file to direct the users to Office 365 and it should look
like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<Autodiscover
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/responseschema/2006">
<Response
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/outlook/responseschema/2006a">
<Account>
<AccountType>email</AccountType>
<Action>redirectUrl</Action>
<RedirectUrl>https://autodiscover-s.outlook.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml</RedirectUrl>
</Account>
</Response>
</Autodiscover>
Once you have created this file, save it in a central location available to all of your users (or multiple
locations available to all your users if required).

 Next, you need to set a registry fix to tell Outlook where to look for AutoDiscover for your
domain. For this purpose you need to create a new Registry Key
at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Autodiscover (for Outlook 2016. For
Outlook 2013 change the 16.0 to 15.0).

The key needs to be a new String with the name being your mail domain, and the value the path to
the autodiscover.xml you created earlier.

When you create a new Outlook profile for a user with an email address @yourcompany.com
Outlook will look to your local autodiscover.xml to find the mail servers, and ignore any local
DNS/SCP entries for AutoDiscover, leaving non-migrated users with their normal expected
experience, and migrated users with the clean and easy experience of AutoDiscover to setup their
clients.

If you experience inconsistent behaviour with the above settings you may need an additional value
for PreferLocalXML set to true (see below).
Full information on the optional settings under the Autodiscover subkey are available
here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/2212902

Adding these might also help:

"ExcludeHttpRedirect"=dword:00000001

"ExcludeHttpsAutodiscoverDomain"=dword:00000001

"ExcludeHttpsRootDomain"=dword:00000001

"ExcludeScpLookup"=dword:00000001

"ExcludeSrvLookup"=dword:00000001

"ExcludeSrvRecord"=dword:00000001