Following on from this post, it came to a point where I had to face facts – I had to completely reinstall IIS. IIS was working fine, but I was trying to install RSA’s web agent to allow OWA to be secured using SecurID, and the installer was insisting that IIS wasn’t installed. Even after (rather bashfully) running a batch script to register every DLL in the inetsrv folder, it still wasn’t right.

Finally, I decided to give up rooting around in the registry and just reinstall. This is somewhat of a trivial task on a ‘normal’ IIS server, but when you combine it with the half a dozen web apps that Exchange installs, it becomes a little more complex.

Luckily there’s a guide for doing exactly this over at Microsoft’s Support site. However, if you followed the guide and then got the following (all too common) error when trying to access Outlook Web Access (OWA):

Outlook Web Access did not initialize. An event has been logged so that the system administrator can resolve the issue. Please contact technical support for your organization.

This error is commonly caused by a permissions or authentication problem. First, ensure that the owa subdirectory (usually under the ‘Default website’ tree) within IIS Manager has the following authentication methods set:

OWA – Basic
8.1.240.5 – Enable anonymous access
auth – Enable anonymous access
Bin – Enable anonymous access
Current – Basic
forms – Basic
Help – Basic
smime – Basic
spell – Basic

Do an iisreset and try OWA again. If you’re still having problems, your IUSR accounts may have changed password during the reinstall, and IIS won’t be aware of the new ones. Follow this guide here, followed by an iisreset, and hopefully you should now have a functioning OWA.