Autodiscover and the Active Directory

When browsing through your Active Directory, you'll see Autodiscover objects in several places.  Here I'm going to help explain a little bit about the differences between these objects and some simple ways to troubleshoot them.  Using tools like ADSIedit or LDP can have far-reaching consequences.  Don't use those tools to modify or delete objects unless you fully understand those consequences.

There are 3 primary locations of Autodiscover labeled objects.

Here is the portion of Autodiscover in Active Directory called the AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory that is easily added and removed with the Exchange Command Shell functions:
Remove-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory -Identity "<CASNETBIOS>\Autodiscover (Default Web Site)"
New-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory -WebSiteName "Default Web Site"

Here is the portion of Autodiscover in Active Directory called the Service Connection Point [SCP] that is only created during installation of the CAS role.  Deleting this directly will require you to most likely uninstall the CAS role, replicate changes through your AD, then reinstall the CAS role.

Here is the portion of Autodiscover in Active Directory that configures Outlook Providers in regards to Outlook Anywhere.  The Get, Set, Remove and New-OutlookProvider commandlets are used to configure this.