Free/Busy Information not available – and it’s not the servers fault.....entirely

I was out at a client site yesterday that I hadn't seen for a while.

They had called me out because Free/Busy wasn't showing in Outlook and there were no issue for OAL/OAB in the event logs.

I was also told that they had some public folder database issues last week which resulted in the Public Folders having to be completely restored.

After about 20 minutes of wading through logs after increasing the logging level for OAL and updating the OAB there were no errors.

On the client devices downloading the address book on the client did not result in any errors. Now these are Outlook 2007 so my mind was not made up that it was Public Folder as Web Distribution was enabled on the OAB in Exchange.

After continued head bashing I found that Outlook doesn't always look at the public folders for Free/Busy.

Now to force Outlook to behave properly you have to hack the registry.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\Calendar
Value Type: DWORD
Value Name: UseLegacyFB
Values: 0 or not set (default behaviour which is to use the Availability Service) or 1 (use Public Folder based Free/Busy information)

After making this change on a few test PC's it worked like a charm.

 

Have fun and be nice to each other J

 

Matt

Exchange 2007 SP1 Update 9 released

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/07/17/451835.aspx

I will be testing the patch tomorrow in the lab and if all goes well. I will be installing it onto production systems in the next few days.

I usually like to let an update settle for a few days in the lab before unleashing it on a production environment.

The note at the bottom of the post from the Exchange team did get me thinking a little in regards to Exchange 2007 SP2 and what it will bring to the table in terms of updates and features.

 

Have fun and be nice to each other J

 

Matt

 

An introduction

I thought that it would be best to give a basic run down of what I actually hope to achieve with these blogs.

It has occurred to me lately that as I go about my day-to-day installs, configs, designs and all the other wonderful things that fill my working day that I really don't have a single place to put all of collective Exchange knowledge.

That being said I also have not really had a chance to sit down and do a collection of some of the more common Exchange how-to's and give back a bit of my knowledge to these that are looking for it.

So.....what can you expect here?

Well at this stage I will be aiming for a couple of posts a week, one of which will be a how-to. The other will probably be a random musing about Exchange or some other the more unusual resolutions to issues that I have found.

Most of these will be about Exchange 2007 but has I am currently having a play with Exchange 2010 I will probably sneak in a few posts about that as well.

As you would be able to see from my profile I work as a Senior Engineer for Datacom Systems in Adelaide. I am currently the "Exchange Guy" – this was originally a title given to me by the sales team how, as anyone that has worked as a System Engineer would know sales seem to like to brand Engineers as either a "guru" or some other description that quite often makes an Engineers neck hairs creep and give us cold chills at the thought of what we may have just be sold to do J

While at the time my experience and knowledge with Exchange was fairly good, I would not, and for that matter still do not, consider myself an expert at Exchange. I have now spent some long nights with Exchange and have both loved it and, at times, hated it......the later is usually caused by user interaction with Exchange and not necessarily the application itself. So to that end I have very much grown into the "Exchange Guy" role and have very much loved it.

I currently hold the following Microsoft Certifications MCSE+Messaging (Windows 2003), MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator, MCITP: Enterprise Administrator and MCTS: Configuring System Center Operations Manager.

So with the introduction out of the way I should probably get back to work and get back to the first series of How-To's which will be starting at the beginning of Exchange 2007; Installations: scripted and local.

 

Have fun and be nice to each other J

 

Matt