Is this the reason for Calendar problems?

[Craig Roberts]

Exchange 2003 SP1
Entourage 2004 and 2008
MacOS X 10.3.9-10.5.4

--

Hi

We have been having continuing problems with delegated calendar management
and so I dug deep into the logs to try to understand what might be going on
.... Webdav is after all just a web service.

There is a lot going on in fact and just to give an idea yesterday there
were 272405 lines of recorded in the log from midnight over the next 24
hours. This is for about 80 Entourage user accounts.

The investigative trail led to the 'Dan's WebDAV 101' blog, with an article
about 'Whats not supported with WebDAV?' In this Dan references MS support
article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920134.

This says some very interesting stuff as follows:

"...
We support the use of the WebDAV protocol for the following items:
€ Non-recurring appointments
€ Contacts in Microsoft Outlook that you create or modify
€ Folders that you create in Outlook and in Exchange 2000 Server or
Exchange Server 2003
€ E-mail messages that you create or modify
....
All other tasks that use the WebDAV protocol to modify a Web store in
Exchange 2000 Server or in Exchange Server 2003 are not supported."

Further information:

"Because of limitations that exist when you create items that are compatible
with Outlook, we do not support complex calendaring when you use the WebDAV
protocol. Complex calendaring applications include the following items:
€ Recurring appointments
€ Meeting functionality

Note Meeting functionality includes sending, modifying, and canceling
meetings.

For applications that require complex calendaring functionality with
Exchange 2000 Server or with Exchange Server 2003, we recommend that you use
the following APIs:
€ Collaboration Data Objects for Exchange 2000 Server (CDOEX)
€ Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) 1.21
€ Outlook Object Model"

So is it right to conclude that MS does not use WebDAV protocol to
communicate complex calendar tasks, but it is implemented using CDO?

So there's a mix of WebDAV HTTP and CDO coding going on in Entourage?

Dan's blog concludes that "Where WebDAV fails to deliver in the areas of
calendaring, Exchange Web Services (EWS) rocks" but does this make life any
easier for Entourage users?


I am a Mac user, part-time scripter and developer in Open Source
technologies. I have not developed in VB before.


Regards
Craig.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

I am a Mac user, part-time scripter and developer in Open Source
technologies. I have not developed in VB before.

And VB isn't going to help you much considering that it is simply not
supported by Entourage,

Corentin

 

[William Smith]

So is it right to conclude that MS does not use WebDAV protocol to
communicate complex calendar tasks, but it is implemented using CDO?

So there's a mix of WebDAV HTTP and CDO coding going on in Entourage?

Dan's blog concludes that "Where WebDAV fails to deliver in the areas of
calendaring, Exchange Web Services (EWS) rocks" but does this make life any
easier for Entourage users?

Hi Craig!

I'm going to need to read through everything you presented to wrap my
head around it but I don't believe CDO is involved. (I'm not a CDO
expert so take my word on that.)

Believe it or not, the delegation features in Entourage 2004 will always
use MAPI when connecting to Exchange Servers and Entourage 2008 will use
MAPI too except when connecting to Exchange Server 2007 where it will
use Web Services.

Read the "Delegate Management" section in Amir Haque's blog post:
"How Does Entourage Work?"
<http://blogs.technet.com/amir/archive/2008/02/08/how-does-entourage-work.aspx>

Web Services is the wave of the future in Exchange. You may already know
that both MAPI and WebDAV are de-emphasized protocols in Exchange Server
2007. While nothing has been announced for the next version of
Entourage, Outlook and Exchange developers are being guided toward
developing against Web Services.

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>
YouTalk <http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/youtalk>