CALENDAR 05 December 2008 17:26

Exchange 2007 / Outlook 2007 Free/ Busy Info not showing up With the migration to Exchange 2007 we've had a couple of minor issues that have been persisting. One of them is the Free/ Busy Info not showing up when trying to schedule a meeting with another user. The odd thing is that it shows up in Outlook 2003 and OWA but not Outlook 2007. There are a couple of things going on here to make it work this way. I'll talk about the basic difference between Exchange 2003 and 2007 first and then about our specific problem. In the past the Free/ Busy Info was stored in the Public Folders information store on Exchange. With Exchange 2007 that has changed to allow faster update times. It is now actually stored and served by each users Outlook using the Exchange 2007 availability service to synchronize this information.. Exchange does maintain a copy of the information for legacy connections and for OWA to work. The reason our older clients and OWA showed the Free/ Busy Info but our newer Outlook 2007 clients didn't was because of a problem with our availability service URL. When I initially setup our mail server I set it up with a test domain so that I could verify that everything was going to work correctly. I added all of our domain accounts, did the whole shabang. Everything worked just perfectly. When it was time to bring the server live I replaced every instance of the test domain name with the real domain name. Everything seemed to be fine. However the Free/ Busy Info thing popped up and I started looking into it. And looking and looking. Well the basic result as you can guess is that the availability service had the wrong URL. It was still referenced by the test domain. There was no place in the GUI to determine or change this. It can only be done in the Exchange Command Shell. If you are having this problem you should do the following steps to determine that all of your URLs are pointing to the right place.

1. With Outlook open Control + Right click the Outlook icon in your taskbar. 2. Select "Test E-mail Auto-Configuration" 3. Put in your email password and uncheck "Use Guessmart" "Secure Guessmart Authentication" 4. Click Test 5. Look at the results and check the Availability, OOF and OAB URLs. If these are not set to the

Public URL of your email server then you have found your problem. 6. On your Exchange server open the Exchange Command Shell. 7. Type Get--WebServicesVirtualDirectory | fl, this should verify the same results that you saw in

Outlook. 8. Type Get--WebServicesVirtualDirectory | set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -internalurl <your

url here> 9. Type Get--WebServicesVirtualDirectory | set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -externalurl <your

url here> 10. Type Get--WebServicesVirtualDirectory | fl, this should verify the new changes you just

made. 11. Wait a few minutes for this to show up in your Outlook.

This resolved our Free/ Busy Info problem. If you are having the same problem I hope this helps you out. Pasted from <http://robbaugh.com/archive/2007/08/16/75.aspx>

http<s>://<server name>/owa/ [<EXCHANGE 2007 explicit logon mailbox identification>/] ?cmd=contents [&id=<folder id>]

[&f=<URL encoded folder path>] [&module=<module to show default folder for>] [&view=<view to show for folder>] [&d=<day for calendar view>&m=<month>&y=<year>] [&part=1] [<legacy parameters>]

Example: "https://srv22/owa/john.doe%40example.com/?cmd=contents&f=inbox%2fmyfolder&view=%20by%20subject" Several of these parameters specify which folder the web part should display. When more than one of them is specified in the URL, this is the precedence order:

Parameter "id" Parameter "f"

3. Parameter "module" 4. If none of the parameters above are present, the default folder to show is the inbox.

All these parameters require URL encoding. We don't expect users to compose them manually. Instead, we expect web parts and others who use these URLs to give users some kind of UI where they can select mailboxes, folders etc. Code behind the UI will then compose the actual URL with the URL encoded parameters. <legacy parameters> are any Exchange 2000/2003 web part URL parameters not supported by Exchange Server 2007 OWA, received as part of a web part URL directed to legacy virtual directories on Exchange Server 2007 (e.g. "/exchange" or "/public") which are forwarded to OWA2007 so support for them can be added in future releases if necessary.

URL component

Description Values

EXCHANGE SERVER 2007 explicit logon mailbox identification

Any SMTP address registered for the user account associated with the mailbox If this part of the URL is not present, the default mailbox of the authenticated user is assumed. https://server/owa/john.doe@microsoft.com/ ?cmd=contents

Example: john.doe@microsoft.com or john.doe@exchange.microsoft.com If both SMTP addresses are registered for the mail box to be accessed

id The folder id of the folder the web part should display contents from.

The Base64-encoded PR_ENTRY_ID of the folder

f A string indicating the mailbox folder to be shown in the web part. It is URL encoded (eg. Space " " becomes "%20", path delimiter "/" becomes. "%2f". The folder hierarchy should start from the mailbox root. This folder path can point to normal folders or search folders.

Example: "inbox%2fmyfolder" Connects to the inbox subfolder "myfolder"

https://server/owa/ ?cmd=contents &f= inbox%2fmyfolder &view=by%20sender

view This parameter specifies the view to be displayed for the folder. Example: https://server/owa/ ?cmd=contents &f=MyCalendarFolder &view=Weekly Exchange 2003 Web Part views not supported in Exchange Server 2007 are: "monthly" view for Calendar, "address card" and "detailed address card" views for Contacts and "unread by conversation topic" and "sent to" for messages. The default views when this parameter is not present are: Calendar: Daily Messages: Messages Contacts: Two%20Line Tasks: By%20Due%20Date When 'default sort' is used for a view, that means the view should be sorted as it would it if was opened in the OWA client (i.e. not through a web part). The strings identifying the views are not localized and not case sensitive.

Calendar views: "Daily" "Weekly" Message views: "Messages"- one line, with default sort "By%20Sender" - one line, sorted by 'from' with 'a' on top. "By%20Subject" - one line, sorted by 'subject' with 'a' on top. "By%20Conversation %20Topic" - Conversation View, only in OWA Premium "Two%20Line" - two line, with default sort, only in OWA Premium Contact Views: "Phone%20List" - one line, with default sort "Two%20Line" - multi line, with default sort, only in OWA Premium Tasks: "By%20Due%20Date" - one line, with default sort "By%20Subject" - one line, sorted by 'subject' with 'a' on top.

d, m, y Specifies the date to display the calendar for. Example: https://server/owa/ ?cmd=contents &module=calendar &view=daily &d=2&m=9&y=2005 The default date when these parameters aren't specified is today's date.

d=[1-31] m=[1-12] y=[four digit year]

module This parameter can be used to specify that a certain default folder should be shown in the web part, without specifying the localized name of the folder. We expose this parameter since some users won't know the localized name of default folders they want to access. https://server/owa/ ?cmd=contents &module=tasks

"inbox" "calendar" "contacts" "tasks"

Part Specifies that OWA should provide UI optimized for the web part format. See below for the different UI OWA will display when part=1 is applied. https://server/owa/ ?cmd=contents &part=1

Pasted from <http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/10/26/429362.aspx>

Screen clipping taken: 19/02/2009, 15:32

Resource scheduling with Exchange 2007 Room Mailboxes In Exchange 2007 the default booking time window for booking a resource mailbox

(i.e meeting rooms) is set to 180 days. Sometimes administrators face the task of

extending this time window, for instance when users need to book recurring

meetings more than 6 months ahead. I spent quite some time figuring out how to

modify the default value. After some research (including a call to PSS who couldn’t

help me out) I managed to find 2 ways of doing this: 1. Exchange Management Shell (EMS)

2. Outlook Web Access

Option 2 provides a graphical way of accomplishing the task, but if you feel like

getting your hands dirty with a little PowerShell go ahead and choose option 1.

1. Extend booking time with EMS

Open Exchange Management Shell

Check the current settings of the resource mailbox by typing the following command:

Get-MailboxCalendarSettings confroom01 |fl

This will list the properties of the resource mailbox:

AutomateProcessing : AutoUpdate

AllowConflicts : False

BookingWindowInDays : 180

MaximumDurationInMinutes : 1440

AllowRecurringMeetings : True

EnforceSchedulingHorizon : True

ScheduleOnlyDuringWorkHours : False

ConflictPercentageAllowed : 0

MaximumConflictInstances : 0

ForwardRequestsToDelegates : True... etc...

As you can see this brings up the properties of the resource mailbox. If you attempt

to change the BookingWindowInDays value from its default 180 days it will fail. What

controls if this value can be changed is the EnforceSchedulingHorizon vaule. Change

it by typing the following command:

Set-MailboxCalendarSettings confroom01 -EnforceSchedulingHorizon false

Now change the BookingWindowInDays value to the wanted number of days as

follows:

Set-MailboxCalendarSettings confroom01 -BookingWindowInDays 360

Validate the changes by running the Get-MailboxCalendarSettings command.

2. Extend booking time using OWA

Log on to OWA with an account that has administrative privileges on the resource

mailbox.

Click on your user name in the top right corner of the browser window. This will bring

up the “Open Other Mailbox” dialogue box.

Enter the name or alias for the Room Mailbox and press ENTER. This will bring up a

new OWA window for the Resource Mailbox. Click the Options link and then Resource

Settings in the menu on the left.

Click the check box “Automatically process meeting requests and cancellations” and

you will have access to all the options where you can set maximum number of days,

limit meeting duration etc.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 23:21 and is filed

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Pasted from <http://davis.se/blog/?p=98>