Exchange - OWA TimeZoneException Error

Here's an easy one today: Users sometimes get the "Time Zone Exception" error below when logging in to OWA, and it all depends on the web browser their using:

X-OWA-Error: SDServerErr;Microsoft.Exchange.Services.Core.Types.TimeZoneException
X-OWA-Version: 15.1.1531.3
X-FEServer: MBX1
X-BEServer: mail.exchangeitup.com

I've never seen this error happen in IE, but very often in Chrome and Firefox. This is due to the way those two browsers implement adblock, which doesn't handle OWA very well.

We don't want to disable adblock completely, since it is useful, but we'll turn it off for OWA.

In Chrome:

Navigate to OWA, then click “Secure” to the left of the URL.

**Note** It might show an "i" info bubble instead of Secure, if you aren't redirecting OWA to SSL - which you really should do.

Find the “Ads” entry, then choose Allow in the menu.

Now, OWA won't be blocked, but other sites will still block ads as normal.

In Firefox:

Browse to OWA and click the shield icon next to the URL to bring up the Control Center.

In the Control Center, click Disable protection for this session.

Once Tracking Protection is disabled, a shield icon with red strikethrough (which means tracking protection is off) will appear in your address bar.

If you need to do this on a lot domain machines, there are GPO templates, but I haven't dove into them to see what you can control...there might be a way to set the adblock exclusions for OWA if you wanna check them out.

For Chrome, grab them here

For Firefox, grab them here

You could also just disallow those browsers and force IE, but that's up to you, and it of course wouldn't have any affect on non-domain computers.