With the migration to Exchange 2007 we’ve had a couple of minor issues that have been persisting. One of them is the Free/ Busy Info not showing up when trying to schedule a meeting with another user. The odd thing is that it shows up in Outlook 2003 and OWA but not Outlook 2007. There are a couple of things going on here to make it work this way. I’ll talk about the basic difference between Exchange 2003 and 2007 first and then about our specific problem.
In the past, the Free/ Busy Info was stored in the Public Folders information store on Exchange. With Exchange 2007 that has changed to allow faster update times. It is now actually stored and served by each users’ Outlook using the Exchange 2007 Availability Service to synchronize this information. Exchange does maintain a copy of the information for legacy connections and for OWA to work.
The reason our older clients and OWA showed the Free/ Busy Info, but our newer Outlook 2007 clients didn’t was because of a problem with our availability service URL. When I initially set up our mail server, I set it up with a test domain so that I could verify that everything was going to work correctly. I added all of our domain accounts, did the whole shabang. Everything worked just perfectly. When it was time to bring the server live, I replaced every instance of the test domain name with the real domain name. Everything seemed to be fine. However, the Free/ Busy Info thing popped up and I started looking into it. And looking and looking.
Well, the basic result as you can guess is that the availability service had the wrong URL. It was still referenced by the test domain. There was no place in the GUI to determine or change this. It can only be done in the Exchange Command Shell. If you are having this problem, you should do the following steps to determine that all of your URLs are pointing to the right place.
- With Outlook open Control + Right click the Outlook icon in your taskbar.
- Select “Test E-mail Auto-Configuration”
- Put in your email password and uncheck “Use Guessmart” “Secure Guessmart Authentication”
- Click Test
- Look at the results and check the Availability, OOF and OAB URLs. If these are not set to the Public URL of your email server then you have found your problem.
- On your Exchange server open the Exchange Command Shell.
- Type “Get–WebServicesVirtualDirectory | fl”, this should verify the same results that you saw in Outlook.
- Type “Get–WebServicesVirtualDirectory | set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -internalurl <your url here>”
- Type “Get–WebServicesVirtualDirectory | set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -externalurl <your url here>”
- Type “Get–WebServicesVirtualDirectory | fl”, this should verify the new changes you just made.
- Wait a few minutes for this to show up in your Outlook.
This resolved our Free/ Busy Info problem. If you are having the same problem, I hope this helps you out.
Robba