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