Terminated with extreme prejudice

You know the scenario -- people in your organization are coming and going all the time. When they come in you have a handle on it. When they go, well, that's a different story.

In particular, Exchange has a nasty habit of letting them leave the building but linger on in broken meetings.

We've been working on the problem and we got asked about it yesterday, so I figured it was a good time for a running commentary.

Let's create a user called Elvis Morrison.

Elvis enters the company sets up a few meetings and, in the way of all flesh, is downsized or leaves for greener pastures. When he leaves this is what his calendar looks like:

We can delete Elvis from Active Directory in a few seconds:

But if we just delete him then his meetings will linger (with no way to cancel them). So in the Conference Room 222 calendar, Elvis is still very much alive!

He's also still in end user calendars.

Now, if we wanted to cancel all of Elvis's meetings BEFORE we deleted him from Active Directory, that would be easy. Just run our tool and click Test2: Report/CancelMtgs

You get options like

Let's say we want to cancel them.

And let everyone know why.

And it tells us what's going on.

BUT let's say users have been being deleted for a while or we deleted Elvis before removing his meetings. We can STILL clean out the resources (we can do the users, too, but let's focus on the rooms and resources).

Let's say we're looking to clear out the cruft from Conference Room 222.

Put in the Room ID and click
It will find all instances of Elvis's recurring meetings in it (as well as any other broken meetings, but I happen to know the only ones in there just now belong to Elvis)

And it creates a separate report

To get rid of them (you can edit the report to remove the ones you want to keep) click


Going into the calendar for Room 222 means it now looks like this, cleaned of the broken meetings Elvis organized.

The more astute among you will recognize there are some additional subtleties to this, but I'll save those for another blog posting.

Editorial addition (Sept 14, 2008)

The "Export Mailbox" cmdlet will archive all Elvis's data to a PST, but it does NOT cancel his meetings. See this discussion.