BlackBerry Open Letter

I just get back from my second trip to the airport today and what's in my inbox but a weird BlackBerry email.

In similar words from Hamlet: methinks they doth protest too much.

Here it is with brief commentary on BerryReview.

Maybe BlackBerry is not living under a rock for acknowledging they are under siege, but they do not acknowledge that this is not in the same envionment as before.  Like Thursday's Macy's Parade the balloons have collapsed and the parade has gone by.  Rather than a leader of the smartphone marathon BlackBerry is now in a dash to safeguard its highest hanging fruit while the lowest hanging drops in other baskets. 

We've had our love/hate affair with the BES server over the years. As both BES and our migration technology for E2K3 were CDO applications anything that screwed up BES (usually permissions or CDO calendaring bugs) were harbingers for what was going to happen with our code.  To this day some of our all-time most popular blog posts are referenced on the BlackBerry forum to deal with permissions issues.

I wish them good fortune.  

But I also wish you the same thing we advise everyone:  look at all your options and test the snot out of them with the knowledge that your user base is seeking direction from you now and your next performance review is coming faster than you think.

Double Booking in Exchange 2003? Look to BES Versions

Gentle Reader,

As a blogging calendar geek Ms. Calendars sometimes gets requests from the field. When they are useful to the general calendar-server managing public, she publishes them.

So it has come to pass that a question came in:

You mentioned on your site about the "perennial exchange problem of double-booked meetings". I thought I would drop you a line to see if this qualifies. We have Exchange 2003 and Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.1.3. Our users run Outlook 2003. We get these periods where users claim they are getting double booked meetings. More often than not we see one as tentative and one as accepted in the same time period. Do you have a resource that clearly explains why this happens? Is BES the culprit? Thanks in advance. Rick

Double bookings are really not unusual in Outlook. Microsoft itself has a guide on How to troubleshoot missing and duplicate appointments in Outlook. It is a work of singular genius: wonderfully complete in what could be causing the problem, and mostly silent on solutions or protocols to solutions (in contrast to Russ's latest blog entry), all the while referring you to other links which will hopefully keep you from realizing you are being given the runaround.

Just because we make a good living out of working with Exchange does not mean we're going to drink the Kool-Aid or praise the manure as BBQ.

But it does advise keeping abreast of your software updates, and that did turn out to be the problem.

In the end the problem has been solved by updating to BES version 4.1.6. The release notes go over the brand new BlackBerry Calendar Synchronization Tool. And to see what effect this will have on your Exchange server, see Technical Note: Impact of using the BlackBerry Calendar Synchronization Tool. So keep an eye on your BES servers, folks.

In general, we've noticed pretty big changes going on in CDO on E2K3: see here and here. With two years of E2K7 migrations under our belt, we're encouraging folks to migrate into E2K7 rather than E2K3.

Also, check out Information about CDO patching and third-party programs that interface with the calendar in Exchange Server and in Outlook.

We have another report of calendar weirdness from the field, this one with BES and E2K7, which we are pretty sure is related to the known problems with cached mode and the incremental change system. We'll blog on that later.

In general, if you notice weird behavior on your calendars, start with your BES server and work back from there. BES is the source of most calendar headaches we hear tell of.

More Calendar Weirdness in Exchange 2003

We keep hearing about calendar bugs in Exchange 2003.

Cases in point:

A meeting update does not appear in Outlook Web Access after a meeting organizer updates the time of one meeting occurrence in an Exchange Server 2003 environment

When you use a CDO-based application to manage calendar items in Exchange Server 2003, the application crashes intermittently

Keep in mind: None of this has anything to do with a calendar migration. It's what seeps into Microsoft products when the Redmond Belle tries to "encourage" you to "upgrade." Both of these are related to CDO and the most prominent CDO-based application is the Blackberry Enterprise Server.

ActiveSync bug in Exchange 2003 - Warning warning!

November looks like ActiveSync month. First I dropped my Sprint HTC SmartPhone because as a phone it was unusable (despite the fact that sync with Outlook was passable).

But Chris Quinn, one of our pals in the calendaring community, alerts us to a Microsoft KB Article 958781:

Some recurring calendar items disappear from the "Day/Week/Month" view in Outlook when a user uses Exchange ActiveSync on a mobile device to modify a recurring meeting in an Exchange 2003 environment

Much like Snakes on a Plane the title says it all.

But unlike SoaP there's more here to worry about (aside from whether you want the extended edition DVD).

The list of affected files for the fix to this problem includes pretty much all of CDO's associated files PLUS MADFB (the main Free-Busy updater).

This is a scary bunch of sensitive code to be changing all at once. And anything that relies on CDO (Anybody out there have BlackBerry Servers?) could get caught in the backwash.

So our warning to you still on Exchange 2003 is to test this HotFix BEFORE you deploy it if you have anything other than a vanilla Exchange 2003 environment

Reports of problems with solution to KB 932511

Chris Quinn, one of our brethren calendar and scheduling wonks, has reported an additional problem with the solution to KB article 932511: Exception meeting requests are deleted from the calendar in Outlook 2003 when recipients use a CDO 1.21 application to accept the master meeting request


This of course comes up because of the DST issue in North America, in his case he had an exception to a meeting that had been scheduled to another resource. The fix on 932511 and the Rebaser put the exception back on the ORIGINAL resource.

We'll keep you updated on if there is a fix to the fix to the fix (we think the recursion only goes that far, but after three we just lose interest and move on to other projects).

Chris also reports that:

Because we forced all the updates we also found out about another
problem. We found that OWA views can differ significantly from the Outlook
views. So we found another article that was quite interesting.
I thought you'd get a kick out of it. Now we can all POOF our calendars…
http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/archive/2007/02/21/poof-your-calender-really.aspx

NB: To all of your looking to migrate Proxies and Designates from legacy calendar servers to Delegates in Exchange -- we need to use CDO 1.21 to accomplish this and the acknowledged memory leaks (see KnowledgeBase Article 891509 A memory leak condition occurs when you create a CDO program or a MAPI32 program to log on or log off many mailboxes in Exchange Server 2003 SP1) are one reason we treat this very carefully. See also KBs 901014 and 913643.

cdoEndByDate Broken

Usually we like to report things that can get fixed. But as we've discovered, fixes to Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) just are not to be hoped for.

We were attempting to create recurring banners in Outlook using CDO server-side.

As this sample code illustrates, the error comes from CDO directly.


Set oApp = New CDO.Appointment
oApp.Configuration = iConfg
oApp.StartTime = CDate("10/4/2006 10:00:00 AM")
oApp.endtime = CDate("10/4/2006 11:00:00 AM")
oApp.Duration = 1 * 60
oApp.Location = "My Cube"
oApp.Subject = "Test: Create Meeting in VB.NET"
oApp.TextBody = "Hello..."

' Add recurring appointment
Set iRPatters = oApp.RecurrencePatterns
Set iRPatter = iRPatters.Add("Add")
iRPatter.Frequency = CDO.CdoFrequency.cdoWeekly
iRPatter.Interval = 1 ' 1 hour from 10 to 11
iRPatter.DaysOfWeek.Add (3) ' every WED
iRPatter.PatternEndDate = CDate("10/25/2006 11:00:00 AM")
iRPatter.EndType = cdoEndByDate

Our recommendation: create them as non-recurring entities and inform users if they want to make them recurring. Since Outlook does not use CDO to interface with Exchange (ever wonder why Microsoft released CDO in the first place?) that will work.