Quick Steps conflict within Outlook

Recently, I’ve had some trouble with Outlook’s Quick Steps and the migration of these over to Exchange Online.

In our case, this is for a client running Microsoft Exchange 2013 on Windows Server 2012. We’re in the process of moving their mailboxes to Microsoft Exchange Online/365.

In some cases, Quick Steps get caught up in an odd state post-migration – the Outlook cache decides to create a new Quick Step Settings folder alongside the original:

I didn’t realise it was possible to have the folders in this state, but it’s certainly happened a few times now. This results in a race condition within Outlook, 50-50 chance it’ll use the right folder and display Quick Steps, or not.

My solution is the following:

1. Close all instances of Outlook, and logon to the session using MFCMAPI. https://github.com/stephenegriffin/mfcmapi
2. Export the contents of the folder that contains associated items (one should be empty, the other containing existing steps).
3. Delete both folders using MFCMAPI.
4. Open and close Outlook, which will re-create the folder.
5. Import the exported data back into the newly recreated folder.

This will restore the Quick Steps functionality and resolve the folder conflict.