Tuesday, November 10, 2009

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.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

I've read through the documentation, but didn't see reference to where the utility should be run for inserting custom holidays. We have each E2K7 server role running on a seperate server. Does the utility run from the Mailbox server?

zyg said...

You MIGHT be thinking of the Sumatra Utilities for Exchange 2003, which DID need to execute on the main server (because that version was based on CDO and that's the way CDO works).

The Utilities for 2007/2010 use EWS, so all you need is a 32-bit client machine with a Windows operating system. Since you do need to create a service account and "Run As...", XP is a convenient choice. You will need to specify your CAS, EWS, and domains.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the follow-up zyg.

another issue i'm facing is that i am having trouble deleting existing 2010 US holidays. i'm using the following command and receive no errors, just a log entry that "undo 0 records was successful".

SuExchange_v2.6.55.exe /usersrc:Alias /user:mbailey /cmd:undo /kwd:Holiday /path
:"C:\_administration\Sumatra Utilities 2010\Holidays" /cfg:"C:\_administration\Sumatra Utilities 2010\_Config_SuExchange.xml"

any ideas?

thanks!

zyg said...

Usually when this happens the holidays were not inserted with a Keyword (a little thing we require so you do not accidentally delete all the calendar data on your server). What command did you use for inserting the holidays?

Unknown said...

The Holidays i'm trying to remove are the standard Outlook holidays with a category "Holiday". In the previous version of sumatra utilities, we were able to remove existing holidays and then add them back with modified category names.

zyg said...

Should work as is. You sure you have the correct category? And that the category is assigned? The other thing to look at is case-sensitivity. We'll try it here and let you know.

zyg said...

OH YEAH -- we see what's going on. Drop me an email and we'll send you a test version that handles your situation.