Hey There,
I'm receiving the following error for all three of my Office Live SharePoint calendars & task lists when clicking send/receive in Outlook 2007:

Task 'SharePoint' reported error (0x8000FFFF): 'An error occured either in Outlook or SharePoint. Contact the SharePoint site administrator. HTTP 501.'

This happens using multiple computers all running outlook 2007 using the same SharePoint resources on the same LAN.  It has been working for approximately 3 to 4 months up until this morning, 09/27/08.  If anyone knows how to resolve this situation or if there is currently a production outage.

Additinoally, I have attempted to use the "Connect to Outlook" button on my Office Live page and that performs the same send/receive action within Outlook 2007 and yields the same error.

Thanks,
Seth =;-)

Hi Seth,

The most common reason for this type of error is that Outlook is attempting to use the wrong credentials when contacting the OLW service.  This can happen when multiple users use the same windows account or when one user has multiple Live Id accounts. Were you prompted to connect to OLW?

This can also occur if the Office Client is not fully patched.  Please make sure that your maching is fully up to date with patches (using Windows Update) and that you have installed the Office Live Update (available from the Toolbar in OLW). The Office Live Update makes sure that critical patches are installed and adds support for Single Sign On from the browser to the Office Client so that logging into the browser will also log you in through the Office clients. 

Finally, I would suggest that you narrow down the problem by trying to use the "Edit in Office Client" feature.  If that feature works but Outlook still does not work then we have narrowed down the problem to an Outlook configuration issue.  If neither work then there is probably a system wide issue like an AntiVirus, Firewall or proxy getting in the way.