Outlook Synchronization Error – 0x8000FFFF

Consider the following scenario-

You deploy SharePoint for your organization on the standard Port 80. Only later you decided that your traffic needs to be encrypted so you purchase an SSL Cert and apply it to your site and add the additional Alternate Access Mapping (or AAM for short). You test the site using https://yoursite.com and all is well.

You realize later that people are still accessing your site via their bookmark which is on Port 80 (not 443). So being the diligent admin that you are you redirect all port 80 traffic to 443 in IIS (there are lots of posts on this). You test to verify that when you navigate to http://yoursite.com your are automatically redirected to https://yoursite.com. All is well … but not really.

SharePoint continues to use the “default” address specified in central admin for certain items like “Synchronize with Outlook”. If you have redirected your port 80 traffic to port 443 AND SharePoint still thinks the default url is HTTP, then you will received a 301 error in Outlook that looks like this:

Task ‘abc’ reported error (0x8000FFFF) : ‘An error occurred either in Outlook or SharePoint. Contact the SharePoint site administrator. HTTP 301.’

Resolution:

Navigate to the AAM section of Central Admin (operations page), click on the default url for your site collection and change it from HTTP:// to HTTPS:// and click OK. Your users will thank you.