Sunday, January 27, 2008

Troubleshooting Exchange 2007 Free/Busy

    In Exchange 2007 the Free/Busy information is stored and accessed in the respective mailboxes, as compared to Exchange 2003, where the Free/Busy is accessed from Public folders.

Public folder distribution is in-efficient because of the fact that it is not up to date in certain circumstances. In Exchange 2007 the Public Folders are De-emphasized and Client Access Server (CAS) role takes most of the functions provided by Public Folder like:

  1. Access to a Exchange mailbox Free/Busy information.
  2. Offline Address Book (OAB) distribution.
  3. Outlook Web Access (OWA)
  4. Outlook Anywhere (previously RPC over HTTP) etc

and in addition to the above the CAS Exchange role provides Auto-Discover service and Availability service.

Availability service:

Availability service is the web-based Free/Busy access provided by CAS role. When a user creates a meeting request for his manager (say), the user's exchange server contacts the Availability service URL which opens the Manager's mailbox and get's the free/busy information to complete the process.

Troubleshooting:

To troubleshoot the availability information, use the

Test-OutlookWebservices cmdlet for scenarios like free/busy information of self, user on same server, user on server in different site etc. You can user Verbose parameter to check the process carried out by Exchange server.

Example: Test-OutlookWebServices  -Identity user1@domain.com -targetaddress user2@domain.com

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