Exchange Gurus... Outlook scheduling issue

We're having a problem with our free/busy in Exchange that I don't recall seeing before. I had a couple people mention to me today that when they attempt to schedule a meeting in Outlook, when they go beyond a certain date in the near future, the scheduling availability is grayed out.

I know there is a option in Outlook where you can set how far in advance to publish your free/busy that defaults to 2 months. However, the information is not visible starting at exactly Midnight on April 1, which is exactly 32 days from now. On Exchange servers that are in different time zones, those users' free/busy scheduling visibility is invisible at exactly midnight on 4/1, adjusted for the time difference. Meeting requests do not fail if the users go ahead and send them, but we need to be able to see the availability of other people so they don't have to keep rescheduling meetings when that other person is busy during that time.

Here is the kicker: this problem is affecting almost, but not all Exchange users' free busy data. Maybe 1 out of 20 has visible free/busy data beyond April 1. I looked at these users and see no correlation that I can surmise. They are all active users from all over the business, some on Outlook 2003 and some on Outlook 2007. The couple of people whose mailboxes I logged on to had the default setting of 2 months published free/busy data in their calendar options.

As far as I know, this issue just started this week, but I can't be sure because I never schedule meetings. Only thing that has changed in the past three months is that we installed Symantec Enterprise Vault to start our mail archiving project. However, only 20 or so users out of 600 are even on the EV system. The only change this software makes to the Exchange configuration it that it installs a couple of custom organizational forms.

Anyone have any ideas on where I could look next? I'm probably going to call Premier support tomorrow if I don't figure it out, but it's always nice to not have to spend one of those limited number of incidents per year if I don't have to

Thanks in advance

blargoe

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Comments

HeroPsycho

Which version of Exchange? Service Pack level?

blargoe

Sorry, I meant to mention that... 2003 sp2.

I did some more playing around yesterday and found that after a while if I change the setting for free/busy publishing in a user's mail client, the free/busy visibility does change eventually. But it gets rounded down to the first day of whatever month. For example, on 2/28, if if it set to the default of 2 months, the free/busy visibility stops being visible at 4/1 instead of 4/28. I extended one person to 4 months, and when it took effect, I could see his visibility up to 6/1 instead of 6/28. And so on, no matter how many months I changed it to.

Today when I checked it, the "cutoff" of free/busy visibility was still exactly midnight of the first of whichever month. And so it has been for the past 3 days. Totally weird.

I didn't call MS yet, my manager wanted to see if it was leap year related and I was able to mitigate the issue somewhat by setting a GPO that extended out the f/b time.