Server-side holiday insertion in Exchange 2007 - example

Well yes, we did go ahead and add the server-side holiday insertion into our mainstream migration code for Exchange 2007.

And we even field-tested it at a site in a mythical place called Canada.

This is a (slightly revised for purposes of pedagogy) holiday file, showing some of the flexibility of our approach. Notice you can have holidays which show as Free "F" or Busy (abbreviation is left as an exercise to the reader) so that our Canadian cousins can list USA holidays as information for everyone in their company, but make sure the time shows as Busy (i.e., do not book then) for Canadian holidays on their calendars.

In an example of instant karma, the test site told us of a wonderfully simple short cut to permissions in setting up insertion (for those of you who have not been through a migration) based on BlackBerry Enterprise Server permissions, which we'll blog on separately.

Please note that this has the following advantages:

• It's run server-side with no user intervention
• It is scriptable from the DOS command line
• It's reversible, i.e., we built in UNDO capability for those occasional accidents
• Handles multiple time zones

Any sites who have been through a migration with us are welcome to use this capability at no charge for Exchange 2007. Just drop us a line if you do not have the latest code.