We are excited to announce that the Remote Connectivity Analyzer tool has been updated! In addition to the standard set of connectivity tests, we’ve added an Office 365 tab and a Single Sign-On test. The new Single Sign-On test will validate users' ability to log on to Office 365 with their on-premises credentials. It also validates some basic Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS) configurations.

Here's an overview and video demo.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&amp;vid=17469476-6807-4f95-a733-da0f4cab5168&amp;src=v5:embed::uuids" target="_new" title="RCA ADFS Intro">Video: RCA ADFS Intro</a>

In addition to the new tests, you will see the same great tests that were always available.

The Remote Connectivity Analyzer is available at https://www.TestExchangeConnectivity.com/.

Tip: you can also get here by going to exrca.com. Same site… just fewer characters to type.

We’re always excited to hear from you - please send us your feedback to ExRCAFB address.

Remote Connectivity Analyzer Release Notes (Also available here)

Version 1.3 (June 2011)

Known Issues

  • A couple of the tests allow you to "Ignore trusts for SSL". Checking this option only tells the tool to not fail if the certificate you are using is not in the list of Trusted Root Certificates – for example, if you were using a certificate from your own Windows CA. This option does not allow the test to be completed over a non-SSL connection. If you do not have a certificate and want to test whether Exchange ActiveSync works over port 80 - this tool cannot perform this validation. We will not be able to add this feature in the future.

    Note: Due to limitations in the RPC API, we are currently unable to ignore the trust requirement for SSL for the RPC over HTTP / Outlook Anywhere tests. We are looking into alternatives for future releases.

  • Copy to clipboard doesn't work in Firefox by default (You have to enable it)
  • Some localized strings are in English if they were modified during this update. These strings will be localized in the future.
  • While performing tests, the stage of testing will no longer update while the test is being performed. This is a necessary change for the moment due to some underlying changes to the Remote Connectivity Analyzer code. Your full test results will be available once the test is complete.

New / Modified Features

  • Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity analyzer is now the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer. The future direction for this tool is to incorporate more products as we have done with Office 365. Thus dropping "Exchange" from the name made sense. There are still lots of strings where you'll see ExRCA or Exchange; we're cleaning these up in a future release.
  • Tabbed user-interface to support multiple products and Office 365.
  • Office 365 Single sign-on validation. This test allows you to validate identity federated scenarios with Office 365. Specifically, this new test targets the "Basic Authentication" federated scenario where a client sends credentials to Office 365 which in turn validates them against the on-premises ADFS server.
  • Fixed an issue where ExRCA wouldn't validate certain top-level domains such as .travel and .museum.
  • Added code so if the Enter key is pressed in the wizard, the default action is "next" instead of "previous". Previously, this didn't work for browsers other than IE.
  • Better cross-browser support, fully supporting IE8-IE9 standards mode as well as other major browsers.

Nicole Allen