Sunday, March 18, 2007

If an attendee to an occurrence of a recurring meeting is removed then the series is updated, the removed attendee is re-invited.

Chris Quinn from Milwaukee writes that:

If an attendee to an occurrence of a recurring series is removed.

Then the series is updated.

The removed attendee is re-invited and the meeting shows back up on their calendar.

The following steps can be followed to reproduce the error.

1. Create a recurring meeting with “Organizer 1” and “Attendee 1” for at least 2 days.
2. Open any occurrence of the meeting and remove “Attendee 1” and send the update
3. Open the series and make any modification(e.g., Add a note to the details) send the update.

You should notice that “Attendee 1” still has the meeting on their calendar, however when you open the occurrence of the meeting that had “Attendee 1” removed, you will notice that “Attendee 1” is not in the meeting.

Chris further adds:
This is not a problem in CDO 1.21 .... This is a problem in Outlook. When a recurring series is updated it does not send the correct updates for the occurrences.
This is similar to a problem Microsoft has acknowledged with resources of which we had written earlier:


We've had reports of meeting locations being overwritten to exceptions to
recurring meetings. As Microsoft KB Article 916108 shows, it is an acknowledged bug in Exchange.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just heard back from our escalation team on this behavior – it appears that a bug was filed for this problem in the past and was rejected as the changes required to alter this behavior were determined to be too destabilizing with a high probability of introducing regressions into the existing calendaring code.

The basic problem is that from the meeting exceptions standpoint is that there is no code in Outlook that distinguishes between removed attendees and regular attendees. When the series is updated and the exception item is loaded, the master appointment recipients are loaded in first and then the exception recipients - so if there is one in the master, but it is not in the exception, the resulting union is that the recipient is still there. So, unfortunately, there isn’t any feature set that supports or deals with the attendee removal from the exception when subsequent updates to the series are made. The only workaround for this is to again remove the attendee from the recurring meeting exception.