I have read others posts and found that you are also seeing issues with
Outlook 2003 Calendering Free/Busy searching. We have a sporadic issue when
people try to schedule meetings and find that there is "No Information"
available when doing a Free/Busy search from Outlook 2003. But on most of
our clients they work just fine. Here's our environment

Windows XP SP2
Microsoft Office 2000
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Exchange Server SP1
AD Group Policy to globally set the Free/Busy options to the following
-Publish "6" month(s) of Calendar free/busy information on the server
-Update free/busy information on the server every "5" minutes

Is this a known bug in Outlook? Exchange?
Is there a fix for the issue?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

I'm having the same issue.

"lldan" wrote:

I have read others posts and found that you are also seeing issues with
Outlook 2003 Calendering Free/Busy searching. We have a sporadic issue when
people try to schedule meetings and find that there is "No Information"
available when doing a Free/Busy search from Outlook 2003. But on most of
our clients they work just fine. Here's our environment

Windows XP SP2
Microsoft Office 2000
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Exchange Server SP1
AD Group Policy to globally set the Free/Busy options to the following
-Publish "6" month(s) of Calendar free/busy information on the server
-Update free/busy information on the server every "5" minutes

Is this a known bug in Outlook? Exchange?
Is there a fix for the issue?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

I am experiencing the same thing. The frustrating part is that it is
not all users, as you state, it's sporadic. Our environment is close
to yours, except for the 6 months, we are 3. I have tried to start
Outlook with the /cleanfreebusy switch, but it doesn't do anything.

If someone is aware of a fix, please let us know!

I'm not sure if this is the issue, but maybe. There is a k article that
describes this issue a bit when using delegates.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309185

I don't think this is it because not all of the troubled users have
delegates setup. This also appears to be happening on some of our mac
machines using Entorage. This leads me to believe it's a server thing. I
have tried running the /cleanfreebusy switch which worked for a couple of
users for a day or so an then reverted back to the slashes (///////) "No
Information", very strange

Our environment is also running Exchange 2003 SP2 not SP1. I was incorrect
in my last post.

So.......right now the 20 or so users having the issue the slashes appear
from June 1st on. This will change to July 1st once March is over. I have
verified that the GPO is set on those machines, both GUI and registry. I'm
still very stumped. Anyone have any thoughts? Ideas? or even a fix?

Thanks



" wrote:

I am experiencing the same thing. The frustrating part is that it is
not all users, as you state, it's sporadic. Our environment is close
to yours, except for the 6 months, we are 3. I have tried to start
Outlook with the /cleanfreebusy switch, but it doesn't do anything.

If someone is aware of a fix, please let us know!

It may NOT be server side. We are having this issue with Free/Busy and we
don't use Exchange Server. We all have Outlook 2003 SP2 and publish
Free/Busy to our FTP server. 90% of the users work with no problems. 10%
have their .vfb file either not being written properly, saved or closed
properly. If you look at the file's icon it looks different than the others,
and it cannot be openned with notepad like the others can. It is always the
same people. We'ved also tried the /cleanfreebusy switch on their Outlook.
Any other clues would be helpful.
--
James D. Miller
Chief Technology Officer
CSS International, Inc.
(800)814-7705


"lldan" wrote:

I'm not sure if this is the issue, but maybe. There is a k article that
describes this issue a bit when using delegates.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309185

I don't think this is it because not all of the troubled users have
delegates setup. This also appears to be happening on some of our mac
machines using Entorage. This leads me to believe it's a server thing. I
have tried running the /cleanfreebusy switch which worked for a couple of
users for a day or so an then reverted back to the slashes (///////) "No
Information", very strange

Our environment is also running Exchange 2003 SP2 not SP1. I was incorrect
in my last post.

So.......right now the 20 or so users having the issue the slashes appear
from June 1st on. This will change to July 1st once March is over. I have
verified that the GPO is set on those machines, both GUI and registry. I'm
still very stumped. Anyone have any thoughts? Ideas? or even a fix?

Thanks



" wrote:

I am experiencing the same thing. The frustrating part is that it is
not all users, as you state, it's sporadic. Our environment is close
to yours, except for the 6 months, we are 3. I have tried to start
Outlook with the /cleanfreebusy switch, but it doesn't do anything.

If someone is aware of a fix, please let us know!

I have been looking into this issue at work and found a posting that
stated that if a user has a virgin calendar (they have never scheduled
an appointment...even with themselves) then other users will see "No
infromation" when scheduling a meeting with that person.

This worked for me:
I found a user who was showing no infomation. It so happened that the
user had no appointments (ever) in their calendar. I had the user
schedule a meeting with himself for a future date/time (save and close)
and waited the 15 minute default time to update free/busy. Then I tried
to schedule a meeting with that person and I was able to see free/busy.

I had also tried to schedule a meeting with the person and have them
Accept, but this did not appear to resolve the problem.

Hope this helps...

Jim Miller wrote:
It may NOT be server side. We are having this issue with Free/Busy and we
don't use Exchange Server. We all have Outlook 2003 SP2 and publish
Free/Busy to our FTP server. 90% of the users work with no problems. 10%
have their .vfb file either not being written properly, saved or closed
properly. If you look at the file's icon it looks different than the others,
and it cannot be openned with notepad like the others can. It is always the
same people. We'ved also tried the /cleanfreebusy switch on their Outlook.
Any other clues would be helpful.
--
James D. Miller
Chief Technology Officer
CSS International, Inc.
(800)814-7705


"lldan" wrote:

I'm not sure if this is the issue, but maybe. There is a k article that
describes this issue a bit when using delegates.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309185

I don't think this is it because not all of the troubled users have
delegates setup. This also appears to be happening on some of our mac
machines using Entorage. This leads me to believe it's a server thing. I
have tried running the /cleanfreebusy switch which worked for a couple of
users for a day or so an then reverted back to the slashes (///////) "No
Information", very strange

Our environment is also running Exchange 2003 SP2 not SP1. I was incorrect
in my last post.

So.......right now the 20 or so users having the issue the slashes appear
from June 1st on. This will change to July 1st once March is over. I have
verified that the GPO is set on those machines, both GUI and registry. I'm
still very stumped. Anyone have any thoughts? Ideas? or even a fix?

Thanks



" wrote:

I am experiencing the same thing. The frustrating part is that it is
not all users, as you state, it's sporadic. Our environment is close
to yours, except for the 6 months, we are 3. I have tried to start
Outlook with the /cleanfreebusy switch, but it doesn't do anything.

If someone is aware of a fix, please let us know!

The calendars already had several events, and just to be sure, we scheduled
test meetings too.

We did find the culprit and solve the problem. The issue is in Outlook.
When you click on - Tools - Options - Calendar Options - Free/Busy Options -
Check Publish - and fill in the location boxes, you must not have a space at
the end! Each user had copied and pasted the URL and it had a space at the
end of it. The URL format they used for both boxes was:


But they had a space at the end, and that is why the ftp log files had .vfb+
on the problem files. The ftp server thought there was an extra strange
character on the file extension. But if you tried to open, read, rename, or
update the file, it could not access it. This needs to go in a Microsoft KB
article and get addressed in an Outlook code fix. Outlook should ignore or
strip out starting or ending (trailing) spaces. Obviously it stumped us all!
It took us 8 weeks to figure this out.

Thanks for your support, and hopefully getting the word out and a code fix.
Jim

--
James D. Miller
Chief Technology Officer
CSS International, Inc.
(800)814-7705


"DougS" wrote:

I have been looking into this issue at work and found a posting that
stated that if a user has a virgin calendar (they have never scheduled
an appointment...even with themselves) then other users will see "No
infromation" when scheduling a meeting with that person.

This worked for me:
I found a user who was showing no infomation. It so happened that the
user had no appointments (ever) in their calendar. I had the user
schedule a meeting with himself for a future date/time (save and close)
and waited the 15 minute default time to update free/busy. Then I tried
to schedule a meeting with that person and I was able to see free/busy.

I had also tried to schedule a meeting with the person and have them
Accept, but this did not appear to resolve the problem.

Hope this helps...

Jim Miller wrote:
It may NOT be server side. We are having this issue with Free/Busy and we
don't use Exchange Server. We all have Outlook 2003 SP2 and publish
Free/Busy to our FTP server. 90% of the users work with no problems. 10%
have their .vfb file either not being written properly, saved or closed
properly. If you look at the file's icon it looks different than the others,
and it cannot be openned with notepad like the others can. It is always the
same people. We'ved also tried the /cleanfreebusy switch on their Outlook.
Any other clues would be helpful.
--
James D. Miller
Chief Technology Officer
CSS International, Inc.
(800)814-7705


"lldan" wrote:

I'm not sure if this is the issue, but maybe. There is a k article that
describes this issue a bit when using delegates.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309185

I don't think this is it because not all of the troubled users have
delegates setup. This also appears to be happening on some of our mac
machines using Entorage. This leads me to believe it's a server thing. I
have tried running the /cleanfreebusy switch which worked for a couple of
users for a day or so an then reverted back to the slashes (///////) "No
Information", very strange

Our environment is also running Exchange 2003 SP2 not SP1. I was incorrect
in my last post.

So.......right now the 20 or so users having the issue the slashes appear
from June 1st on. This will change to July 1st once March is over. I have
verified that the GPO is set on those machines, both GUI and registry. I'm
still very stumped. Anyone have any thoughts? Ideas? or even a fix?

Thanks



" wrote:

I am experiencing the same thing. The frustrating part is that it is
not all users, as you state, it's sporadic. Our environment is close
to yours, except for the 6 months, we are 3. I have tried to start
Outlook with the /cleanfreebusy switch, but it doesn't do anything.

If someone is aware of a fix, please let us know!