Exported contact to vCard turns free busy URL to question marks

[Ron Stagg]

I have this feeling that I'm taking crazy pills and wanted to ping the
community on this issue.

Here's what's up:
I have successfully published free/busy info to an Internet URL, I can see
the free busy information from a remote system if I manually type in the
published URL into my contacts list in my remote Outlook client. (Open a
contact, details tab, Internet Free-Busy, Address

Now here's where it gets crazy, if I save that contact as a vcard file and
open it, the "Address:" field on the details tab, under Internet Free-Busy
section turns my url into: "http://?????????????????????????"

so if i were to send that vcard to a client and they were to add it to their
outlook contacts list and then try to schedule a meeting with me, they would
receive Outlook toast saying that there was an error accessing
"http://?????????????"

I tried this from two different Outlook 2003 clients on two totally separate
systems and saw the same behavior.

Has anyone ever seen this? Am I taking crazy pills? I've searched the
breadth of the Internet and have found NOTHING about it.

The obvious work around is to manually type in the url and save in outlook,
but who wants to tell clients that they have to enter this URL into their
contact?

Can anyone else in the community try this and see if they get the same and
reply to this post?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

I can duplicate the problem here. The solution would be to send them the actual Outlook contact, not a vCard. Create a rich-text format message and use the Insert | Item command to insert the contact.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Ron Stagg]

Thank you Sue for the fleet response.

Is this expected behavior, is this something that can be bugged or is
planned to be fixed in a service pack do you know?

To use the "Insert Item" command, users have to use the Outlook email client
as opposed to the Word email client (as that feature is only availabe in the
outlook client)

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

I would consider it a bug and have passed it along to my contacts at Microsoft. Outlook 2007 does not exhibit the same problem.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

Not so. Insert Item is also available with Word as editor. Just look in the
right place: next to the attachment icon (hint: the paperclip).