ResourceWatch Online Capability Beta

Anybody who has done a migration with us has gotten one of our "Shock and Awe" reports showing what your calendar use looks like.
No surprise we've been developing this capability.
If you go to our on-line beta, you'll be able to generate a really cool report on your conference room or resource use.
We've used it on ICS format files from Exchange 'natch, but Oracle Calendar seems to work just as well. We're using Microsoft SilverLight, so working with anything other than Internet Explorer we do not guarantee, but if it works for you just let us know.

ResourceWatch Error: The Service cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation

A client called after their ResourceWatch installation started to fail with this error:

Exception: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The service '/ResourceDataService.svc' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation. The exception message is: Could not load file or assembly 'App_Web_aza-n8ud, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies......

How odd----it's been running without issue for months.

There were two possible reasons for the failure:

1. The virtual directory was renamed, or
2. .Net Framework 3.5 was not installed

"Virtual Directory Renamed" When Sumatra The “Publish Web Site” deployment model in Microsoft’s Visual Studio hinges on the name of the web application mapping directly to the virtual directory name. Renaming the virtual directory without changing the ".compiled" directive causes the application to crash. If you don't have to rename the directory, don't. If you do, and it crashes, read Tom Fuller's post where he solves his 'Issue deploying WCF service to IIS 6 in non-updateable mode.'

".Net Framework 3.5" The other reason this fails is because .Net Framework 3.5 is not installed. (This is easily checked, and if you didn't rename the virtual directory, this is likely the problem.)

In this case, the app was moved to a different box, the virtual directories remained the same, BUT, .Net framework was not installed.

FullAccess fails with the error: The specified folder could not be found in the store.

I have been banging my head against the Exchange 2007 brick wall for the last month over the error: "The specified folder could not be found in the store."

Sumatra's conference room analysis tool's Exchange Web Service calendar folder "FindItem" request failed for about 5% of the rooms at one client. Other clients do not have this problem! The service account had FullAccess to all rooms. All conference rooms were on the same Exchange mailbox server, in the same OU, configured to autoaccept. Some had delegates, some did not.

The client could use the service account credentials to access the calendars via OWA. Was it a corrupted meeting? We changed FindItem's interval. No luck. Was EWS timing out over a large mailbox? Increased the HTTP timeout. No luck. Our FindItem requet uses the DistinguishedFolderID. We called GetFolder to find the FolderID. It failed on the inbox with the message "The specified object was not found in the store", and for the calendar folder with the message "The specified folder could not be found in the store".

Ahha! The permissions were not inherited. We added "InheritanceType: All" and it worked. Here is the syntax:

Get-Mailbox -filter {isResource -eq $True} -Resultsize unlimited
Add-MailboxPermission -User: xxxx -AccessRights: FullAccess
-InheritanceType: All

Preview of ResourceWatch

We thought we'd give you a taste of something that's been in development and now in beta. We've been doing analysis of resource use in Exchange for a while, and when one of our favorite clients in the world asked us about turning our analysis into something they could use on an on-going basis, we kind of just started writing it.

Since pictures are worth more than words, I'll start the screen grabs here.

That's the screen display, based on Silverlight. We just all love the way the data comes up on the screen.

But since Microsoft believes Silverlight has no need to ever print anything, we have a separate portion handling output (we call it the "Printer-friendly version"), and these are representative samples:

So what the heck can you do with this? Well you can finally

• Have statistics on how often conference rooms / resources are used
• Know how many people have used them
• See when the high demand days / times are
• Start to quantify decisions like "Do I need two conference rooms on this floor or will one do?"