Unable to scheduling appointments months in advance.

[Marcus]

Hi,

I have a client is trying to schedule a meeting in Outlook 2003.

However with the people she is trying schedule; you can't see if they are
available in 2 months time etc.

ie. you dont know if they're available in june or august etc. if you're
trying to make an appointment in February.

Colleagues of her are able to do this.

Does anyone out there know if they can help with this?

Thanks in advanced.

Marcus

 

[Brian Tillman]

I have a client is trying to schedule a meeting in Outlook 2003.

However with the people she is trying schedule; you can't see if they
are available in 2 months time etc.

This means they are not publishing their free/busy data that far in advance.

 

[Nikki Peterson [MVP - Outlook]]

You may want to take a look at the following Technet Artcle:

Conditions that affect the display of Free/Busy time in Outlook
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=196885

"Published Free/Busy" is usually the cause. The article gives a
step-by-step how to adjust. As an FYI, the client is probably
set to publish 2 months which is the default.

Nikki Peterson

 

[Marcus]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your reply. I've checked the clean/free busy option & you're
right about it. It is set at 6-months currently but when I change it to
12-months>apply it then I go back to check & by default it's gone back to
6-months.

I think I probably need higher admin rights to make the change permanently
but we have a lan team that looks after this sort of background support.

I did manage to check another users Outlook settings for the clean/free busy
& it's the same settings. I think I'll probably try to reset this users
profile as well which is the minimum I can do for the time being.

 

[Marcus]

Hi Nikki,

Thanks for your reply. You've pointed me in the right direction. But as to
the reply that I've left for Brian as well, I've gone in & checked that my
user has it set to 6-months but when she goes to view Aug-Sept onwards it
shows a line of \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ which she cannot make any
appointments for. I've changed it to 12-months but when I go back in to check
it defaults to 6-months again. One of the users settings I checked with did
mention that originally we had it set to 2-months ages ago.

So atm I'm still stumped on this one. I'll see if the profile reset works I
guess.

 

[Nikki Peterson [MVP - Outlook]]

You may have to request your Lan Admins to change the
setting for you. If they are using "Office Group Policy Templates"
for you then all changes you make are futile. They will be reset each
time you log in. This is very common and makes it easier for the
LanAdmins to make mass changes for everyone very quickly.

Nikki Peterson

 

[Marcus]

Hi guys,

Ok solved it.

Basically it was global permissions set to 6-months for all users. So it
worked fine for other users.

The profile reset didn't help, so what I then did was just go to:

Start>Run>typed in... Outlook.exe /cleanfreebusy

That worked & our user could then see beyond June-Aug. So there was some
sort of fault that occured that wasn't allowing those 3 additional months to
be viewed.

For those that don't know - /cleanfreebusy = clears & regenerates free/busy
information on a Exchange server. The '/cleanfreebusy' would reset the data
being pulled from the Exchange server for the other calendars that you were
trying to open.