Removing Outlook Holidays Server-Side

We get all kinds of requests on the Holiday insertion application.

One of the more recent ones is interesting enough to blog about.

The subject is the holidays Outlook client can insert for you and how to remove them SERVER-SIDE.

Turns out that the old Exchange 2003 Utilities could handle this as a matter of course, but our new version did not until last week.

Here's the slightly longer technical story about what's happening: The Outlook holiday capability inserts client-side and helpfully includes the Category "Holiday"

That's good - because I have no idea what corporate or university user needs to know when Groundhog Day is (who put this list together, a grade school teacher?).

Looking at it in OutlookSpy you can also see why the terminology "Keyword" got applied to this early on and stuck.

Anyway, in Exchange 2003 the Sumatra Utilities used only the Keyword field, but to be safer in Exchange 2007 when we moved to EWS we also used a couple of hidden fields including Mileage (not as uncommon a technique among calendar applications as you might imagine).

So we expanded the concept of UNDO to be both for Category only or Category AND Mileage.

The good news, we fixed it so if you want to remove data server-side you can.

AND REMEMBER: We require keywords so that you do not accidentally remove everything in a calendar. But you WILL remove everything tagged with "Holiday." So be careful! You have been warned.

Exchange 2007 Calendar Issues fixed with Rollup2

On 1.22.2010, Microsoft released Rollup2 For Exchange 2007 SP2.

Here are the calendar-related issues that Rollup2 addresses:

970817 An appointment is displayed incorrectly as an all-day event if you use a mobile device to synchronize the calendar in Exchange Server 2007

971177 The Auto Attendant 'Business Hours' schedule is not updated in Exchange Server 2007 when the DST setting is changed

971349 Exchange Server 2007 users intermittently cannot access an Exchange Server 2003 user's Free/Busy information in Office Outlook 2007

973969 Incorrect exceptions are generated for a recurring iCalendar message when an Exchange Server 2007 server processes an SMTP message that contains the iCalendar message part

974161 Some attendees cannot receive a meeting cancellation notification when the appointment recurrence pattern is changed by using EWS in Exchange Server 2007

974999 The "Task Owner" field is not set when you create a task in Outlook Web Access

975165 EWS proxying requests fail after you run Availability Service requests in a CAS to CAS proxying scenario in Exchange Server 2007

975404 An attachment of a meeting request cannot be opened when you use a CDO application to accept a meeting request in Exchange Server 2007:

975903 The RemoveDelegate operation of EWS fails, and then a "500 internal server" error response and event ID 4999 are logged in an Exchange Server 2007 server

976025 The free/busy information of an Exchange Server 2007 user is not displayed

977091 The time for an updated meeting request is incorrectly shown in an exception instance of a recurring meeting request on an Exchange Server 2007 environment

Zimbra Calendar / Tasks / Contacts to Exchange 2007/2010 Migrations

December was a busy time at the Sumatra HQ.

We averaged two migrations a week and got three inquiries about migrating calendars from Zimbra to Exchange -- one of which we consider credible in that they kept a dialog going.

So, after a few weeks of skunk works development (which is an oxymoron here), we've got Zimbra calendaring, tasks, and contacts migrating into Exchange 2007/2010, with full state information intact.

Of course, if you want to take calendar data INTO Zimbra we can still do that. But we are kind of psyched that this is the first calendar we'll take you into or out of.

Keep in mind, you could export your ICS files and import them into Exchange (try it and see if that preserves your guest responses) or you could just move PSTs (again, try it). Our process re-creates the guest lists and responses of the calendar data on the Exchange side and it does it server-side with no end user interaction.

Oracle Calendar Server Designate to Microsoft Exchange Delegate Migration

Trying to get Outlook Delegate Permissions:

from Oracle Calendar Server Designate Access Rights

can be tough.

We just made the Oracle Calendar DESIGNATE to Microsoft Exchange DELEGATE migration simpler (and removed PFDAVAdmin from the equation, while it worked it was a complicated pain in the neck).

Now under the processing stage check box in our insertion code is an option called "Set Delegates"

It takes a converted designates export file, as we've previously told you how to build, and will set those according to these rules:

• Users must be VALIDATED
• NO delegates are set to see PRIVATE items on Exchange
• NO delegates are set to receive Meeting Invitations
• There is no UNDO for Delegates
  

Here is the “get-mailbox fl” command that shows Russ has been set as Zyg's delegate

In the database:

If Delegate is true then the user is assigned as an EDITOR

If ReadONLY is set to true, then the user is assigned as a REVIEWER

If ReadONLY is set to FALSE, then the user is assigned to AUTHOR

Here is the commandlet to WIPE OUT ALL DELEGATES, regardless of who set them:

get-mailbox -ResultSize unlimited where {$_.Servername -like "Server" -and $_.GrantSendOnBehalfTo -ne {}} Set-Mailbox -GrantSendOnBehalfTo $null

(Remember to change “SERVER” to your server name!)

We suggest you use this in your TEST environment for verification purposes.

Insert Holidays Server-Side into Exchange 2007

Done.

Ship it.

The Sumatra Utilities for Exchange 2007 are now available for download.

Keep in mind, they won't just insert holidays for the 2010 calendar year, they'll also let you:

• Check for broken meetings in your conference rooms
• Gracefully remove terminated user meetings
• Extract resource use data you can then analyze in a spreadsheet (not full ResourceWatch but it gives you easy access to data that was hard to get before)
• And if you want to start using them to develop your own applications (we've got one business school that's done that and another evaluating), we can do that as well.

Sumatra Utilities documentation is out

A quick update on the Sumatra Utilities for Exchange 2007: we've field proven them in an East Coast medical school with over 8000 users.

Insertion of 10 holidays for these users took about three hours.

We consider that a success.

We're running our final regression testing on them now but we can give you the link to the documentation (Word format).

http://www.sumatra.com/Sumatra%20Utilities%20Manual.doc

Stay tuned.

Impersonation in Exchange 2010

Quick tip: Impersonation in Exchange 2010 has morphed from setting ACLs to Role Based Access Control (RBAC). It could not be easier to impersonate users in the entire domain:

new-ManagementRoleAssignment -Name:_suImpersonateRole
-Role:ApplicationImpersonation -User:'xxx@xxx.xxx'

Here is a link to a Microsoft TechNet article: Understanding Role Based Access Control