DST Updating in Exchange: What the Heck Happened to my Managed Resources?

So let's say you've successfully modified the Time Zones for your Exchange Server, Outlook clients, and run the Time Zone Update Utility.

Your users haven't spontaneously burst into flame, but they are really curious what's happened to the conference rooms.

Accepting invitations for resources

First off: If you needed to turn off your Auto-Accept agent -- or resource management software, and are not running with an event sink that automatically accepts for you, you may have some meeting invitations in your resource Inboxes. Microsoft AAA you should be OK with as long as you set the Depth to "3" as per Microsoft's instructions -- where we've seen issues it's been with the Third-Party Resource Managers (Who shall remain diplomatically nameless).

The Sumatra Utilities can automatically accept all of these.

Use the following syntax:

su /a /u:conf_room

to accept ALL of the invitations in a given Resource mailbox.

Note you can also use the /in:file.txt command to deal with a group (one line per resource alias).

After doing this of course, it is very reasonable to assume that you may have double-bookings.

Determining Double-Booking

You could open each resource and scan the calendars one day at a time, but enterprise calendaring software is supposed to make your life easier not harder.

To produce an output file highlighting double bookings, enter the following:

su.exe /u:conf_room /DB /ND:45

NOTE – for double bookings, the MAX DAYS (ND) is 45 days from today (you cannot change the start date).

Also this will take the /in:filename.txt parameter.

What if the resource is Triple (or more!) booked?

How much functionality do you want in free utilities? Seriously, we handle that -- but it will do all the cross-pairs of double-booking, i.e., if you have triple--booked meetings "1", "2" and "3" it reports in the outfile.txt report that "1" and "2" conflict, "1" and "3" conflict, "2" and "3" conflict .... you get the idea.

But the good thing is that you've got it in one local place from a relatively speedy method.

An example of part of the output file follows for a quadruple-booked case in room "cr222":

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timer: Start=2/5/2007 5:40:30 AM (ver v2.3.18)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

User:cr222Resource Mtg Organizer Mtg Name MtgStart MtgEnd IsDblBooked Meeting Type

Validated cr222
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 4 2/5/2007 9:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 3:00:00 PM Double Booked with 3 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 3 2/5/2007 10:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 2:00:00 PM Double Booked with 4 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 4 2/5/2007 9:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 3:00:00 PM Double Booked with 2 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 2 2/5/2007 11:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 1:00:00 PM Double Booked with 4 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 3 2/5/2007 10:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 2:00:00 PM Double Booked with 2 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 2 2/5/2007 11:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 1:00:00 PM Double Booked with 3 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 4 2/5/2007 9:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 3:00:00 PM Double Booked with 1 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 1 2/5/2007 12:00:00 PM 2/5/2007 12:30:00 PM Double Booked with 4 Appointment