A customer of mine was struggling with the following error in Outlook:

Microsoft Outlook: Cannot send this item

It started appearing after they introduced a new Exchange 2010 infrastructure and had migrated some pilot users from their Exchange 2003 environment. At first the repro we found was: start a new mail, type some random stuff in it and then wait. After some time (10 – 15’) hit send and see if you get the error. Now that was really lousy to reproduce…

On the internet we found a workaround: whenever the error would popup, you can choose the “Format Text” tab en switch between HTML and Rich Text. Then just hit send again.

We weren’t satisfied though, because of this formatting workaround we were suspecting a problem with the html of the signature in the mails. We found a hotfix regarding GIF images and outlook but that didn’t seemed to solve it. Besides that, our issue wasn’t always reproducible and time seemed to be a factor… So we shifted away from the formatting issues and looked further.

After some network tracing, lots of coffee and patience we seemed to have found the culprit. By clicking right on the outlook tray icon (while holding ctrl down) you can view some connection statistics:

And:

The picture is a bad example as I’m actually disconnected, but you get the idea. What we were seeing was that we had quit some failed requests. However this wasn’t really noticeable in the Outlook from the user point of view. Now we could reproduce our problem by opening several mails and just waiting until a failure popped up in the statistics. After such a failure we couldn’t send any of those mails we had open.

Once we learned this, we involved some networking guys to check all involved devices: firewalls, load balancers, … and they found out some device was malfunctioning (dropping packets).

Summary: if you are hitting the “outlook cannot send this item” error. Don’t go for the easy workaround by learning your users to change the format back and forth.  In stead do some troubleshooting and check the health of your network, at least if you are seeing connection failures in the statistics…

A colleague of mine pointed me the following facts:

• Windows 2008 RTM does not support Windows 7 as KMS clients
• Windows 2008 RTM + SP2 + KB968912 does support Windows 7 as KMS clients
• Windows 2008 (in any version) does not support Office 2010 KMS clients
• Windows 2003 does support Office 2010 KMS client (with the Microsoft Office 2010 KMS Host License Pack)
• Windows 2008 R2 supports both (probably the Microsoft Office 2010 KMS Host License Pack is required as well)

So there are two options: Windows 2003 based KMS or Windows 2008 R2 based KMS.

Reference: Microsoft Volume Licensing: Product Activation

It seems like there is some graphical tool to manage or check KMS statistics: “Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) 2.0”, I’ll definitely try this one out if I find some time.

A screenshot from VAMT from the Manage Activation Using VAMT 2.0_White Paper 

[update 9/06/2010] The following URL is a reference for KMS related stuff: Volume Activation Deployment Guide