Outlook calendar availability not viewable/hashed out

[Hong]

A small number of Outlook 2000/XP/2003 mailboxes in a native Exchange 2000
org are having their published calendar items beyond Aug2005 hashed out when
viewed by a prospective meeting organizer, i.e. when somebody is trying to
invite the affected person to a meeting, the latter's calendar beyond Aug2005
is hashed.

The affected users can still use their calendar as normal, with a full view
beyond Aug2005

Have checked

1. Delivery is to the user mailbox, not Personal Folders

2. default Publish options at Tools.Options.Calendar Options.Free/Busy
Options: 15 minutes and 2 months. Attempt to shorten the update interval to 1
minute was to no avail

3. Use another mailbox (with Reviewers permission to the affected mailbox)
can see all the affected mailbox's appointment including those after August
1st. Creating a new appointment from the Reviewers mailbox, and adding the
affected mailbox as an attendee to a meeting when the latter's availability
was still hashed out.

Just one 'improvement'. When extending the Publish vaule from 2 months to 3
months, the avail period now covered Aug2005 but hashed out from Sep05 !

I don't believe UPDATEFB tool addresses this problem. What about MDBVU32? Or
any other remedial means?

Thanks


Hong

 

[tbgg]

What you're describing here is Outlook Free/Busy information at work.
Free/Busy specifically refers to the schedule info you see when you try to
book a meeting with someone. One of the biggest quirks about it is that if
you elect to publish say, 2 months of Free/Busy information, one would think
that would translate to 2 months from today, or through August 30. But it
actually translates to all of the current month, plus one more month, so your
meeting organizers would only see through end of July when they try to book
their meetings.

Sometimes you find that a person has set their Free/Busy to publish, say 6
mo. of data, but when you try to book a mtg with that person, you see less
than that. You can try running Outlook with the /cleanfreebusy switch on
their machine, but I personally haven't had that much luck with it. The only
thing I'd know to suggest is having your users increase the amount of
Free/Busy info they publish.

Good luck--I hope this helps a little.

tbgg
TrueBlueGeekGirl