Outlook 2000, 2003 and freebusy

[Jason Grimme]

We are running native mode Exchange 2000, and have clients using
Outlook 2000 and now Outlook 2003.

We are running into an issue where Outlook 2003 will *corrupt* the
freebusy data for a target mailbox. When the freebusy data has been
modified by Outlook 2003, subsequent access of the mailbox w/ Outlook
2000 will hang on exit, and the only way to force it to close is to
kill outlook.exe in the task manager.

The freebusy data can be *fixed* by running outlook.exe /cleanfreebusy
on an Outlook 2000 client, however the mailbox eventually reverts to
the old symptom after a while, more than likely by Outlook 2003
updating the freebusy data on the server.

Anyone else running into this?

Any suggested fixes?

Does anyone else see this as a bug with Exchange/Outlook, or a new
*feature*?

I have a case open with Microsoft, and they have
acknowledged/duplicated the symptom, but from what I understand are
hesitant to call it a problem and/or provide a fix.

Thanks!

-jg

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

It's a known problem because Outlook 2003 adds a 4th field to the 3
that were there already in previous versions for free/busy
information. The problem was originally supposedly only on CDO 1.21
accesses to the mailbox, which is corrected by an Exchange patch and a
new version of CDO 1.21 for client machines.

However, I've seen the same thing in some mailboxes on my Exchange 5.5
server that have been hit with both Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2003 and
aren't using any code to hit the free/busy information.

You can try seeing if not publishing or reading any free/busy
information from Outlook 2000 on those mailboxes helps, if not you'll
have to either restrict access to any mailboxes hit by Outlook 2003 to
only Outlook 2003 or use a startup shortcut for your Outlook 2000
machines that includes the /cleanfreebusy switch. Not sure how that
would work if the Outlook session hit any free/busy information after
that startup though.