Broken E2K7 Meetings Part 2: Getting rid of them.

So you have some broken meetings, eh?

It's easy for your users to just delete them -- but your conference rooms have a certain inflexible uncreative temperament that means some biological entity capable of passing the Turing test needs to be looking over their collective shoulders.

Or you could use software.

Specifically our software.

First let's revisit the broken meetings in Conference Room 222 of our previous post. The 10:00 AM meeting is broken, and should not be in the calendar.

How do we have the audacity to call it "broken?"

Well it's not in the owner's calendar, and he tried to cancel it. I'd argue it's pretty clear it should not be in the resource calendar.

So now we probably want to divide this into two steps: Finding the broken meetings and removing the broken meetings.

Those of you with experience with SuExchange2007 will be aware of the little "test" button in the corner. This is where we send you to test that you really do have adequate permissions for the calendar insertion we're about to do.


This is also where we're headed to get this menu:

I've taken the liberty of filling in Conference Room 222's alias: "room222" and indicating that it is a resource.

Now, click this button:

And it will create a text file called "_suExLog_BrokenMtgs.txt" which includes our test subject:

Pressing "Delete Broken Meetings" will remove them and log that to a report.

This is scriptable so if you're interested let us know.

Sorry, folks, this one only works for Exchange 2007.

New Means of Creating Broken Meetings in E2K7. Part 1: Getting them

Broken meetings used to be relatively simple to create with Outlook 2003.

Outlook 2007 did a good job of correcting some of the problems by tightening the behavior when an owner deletes a meeting.

BUT in Exchange 2007 using Outlook Web Access (OWA) it turns out to (still) be relatively simple to create broken meetings to clog up your resource calendars.

I'll admit this is slightly convoluted AND bad user behavior, but we can do this using standard, completely legitimate commands. This makes us leery about what other methods remain to be discovered.

So first let's look at my calendar:

Three meetings each with Conference Room 222 already reserved.

Highlight the one at 10:00 AM and press DELETE. This dialogue box displays:

NOW for the deviltry. If you press "Send" right now everything will be hunky-dory and the meeting will be cancelled cleanly. But let's not.

Instead, let's say that you DELETE the conference room AND add "zyg" as a required guest:

THEN hit SEND. In Zyg's calendar we see the meeting has been cleanly deleted.

Aside: Adding "zyg" is a crucial step. If you try to send without a Required user you get an appropriate warning.

Anybody care to guess what the calendar for Conference Room 222 looks like? Right. The meeting is still in there.

Kudos go to Russ and the insertion team for discovering this.

So ends Part I: Creating the broken meeting. Watch this space to see how you can find and remove the broken meetings.

Note that KB 954284 Outlook 2007 does not send out meeting cancellations if you remove all invited attendees from a previously created appointment describes a similar situation using Outlook 2007 rather than OWA.

Real World Exchange Broken Meeting Statistic

We recently got an export of a real world conference room schedule in Exchange 2007 from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2008 and did some analysis on it.

That one room hosted 2,450 individual instances of meetings (i.e., we count each recurring instance).

Figuring that there are 260 work days in a year, this means on average there are 9 meetings a day in that conference room (which sounds pretty close to full capacity, though there are occurrences on weekends).

What was also interesting was that there were 288 broken meetings in it (clogging the availability), or on average 1 broken meeting per work day.

Now given that this is from ONE conference room are we drawing big conclusions from it? No.

We were really astounded to see it anywhere near 1 per work day, though.

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.

Best signature we've seen so far

Christopher Quinn in Wisconsin, one of our favorite calendar geeks, has one of the more helpful email signatures we've seen in a while, which we're posting here to spread the word.

These are the top behaviors to encourage to keep from creating broken meetings in Outlook/Exchange.

The 4 most important things you can do to prevent calendar related issues

1. Always send updates to all when making any change to a meeting


2. Always send cancellations to meetings being removed from a calendar


3. Always process meeting requests every time you open them


4. Make sure that requests are deleted from the inbox after replying

And for those of you who want the full story - check out the excellent article Outlook meeting requests: Essential do’s and don’ts

A new source for broken meetings in Outlook/Exchange

Just as we're getting certain we found and plugged one source of broken meetings, along comes another.

Namely, KB 954284 : Outlook 2007 does not send out meeting cancellations if you remove all invited attendees from a previously created appointment.

The interesting thing about this one is that it occurs in pure Outlook 2007 environments, as opposed to the more well-known 2003/2007 cases.

We're looking at it.

Broken Meeting Data and Exchange 2007

Let's say you're in Exchange 2007 and still using Outlook 2003 (not that we ourselves do this or have any clients with this kind of environment, but we hear tell it's still done). So you create a meeting and invite a managed resource. Like this:

Let's say that later on your users do things like deleting resources from meetings and not sending updates. Sort of like this:

Is this avoided by using Outlook 2007? Yes. But 1.) This happens now and 2.) If you upgraded to 2007 from 2003 before you mandated Outlook 2007 to correct this you probably still have the results of this activity floating around your calendars.

The result is what we've been calling Broken Meetings (you'll hear us sometimes call them "orphan" or "zombie" meetings) -- cruft that's making your resources harder to manage by taking up space they shouldn't be.

This wouldn't be a big problem if you could

1. Identify them


2. Remove them

So glad you asked what we were doing about it. Since we've gotten really used to creating well-formed calendar data in Exchange we started reversing the process to find data that isn't well-formed.

The result is this early version of code based on our existing insertion tools:

Check out the FindBrokenMtgs and DelBrokenMtgs buttons. I also need to mention that anyone who's fallen into the various Permissions black holes in E2K7 will immediately (and correctly!) intuit that setting this utility up to dig out all this data can be challenging.

Keep in mind we created a Broken meeting in Room 222 above, so let's feed that in and see what we find:

Looking for Broken Meetings we find the one that we know is waiting to be found.

Next step of course is to remove it.

The process obviously gets a lot more complicated when you add recurring meetings and recurring meeting exceptions to the mix (and we've already dealt with that).

Also the process is closely related to the "Terminated User" problem of how to clear out meetings from former employees (and you'll see oblique references to this on some of the buttons above).

We'd really like to hear feedback on how useful capability like this would be and the best way to present it to an Exchange Admin.