Sumatra Utilities - Holidays for the remainder of 2010

Since the year is drawing to a close, we're going to put up the Sumatra Utilities for 2010 for no charge for the rest of 2010.

So Exchange Admins in the USA can server-side insert Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, and Canadian users can do Thanksgiving and Remembrance Day, and UK users can do bank holidays from now until the end of the year and... OK OK you get the idea.

This version will only insert data up to January 2011. This version works with both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010, and will not work for hosted Exchange (i.e., Live @ Edu). Hosted sites working with us on migrations already have versions that will insert holidays.

To download the ZIP file just click here. If you want to read through the documentation first, please do.

Look for an update from us in October about what we'll do with server-side Exchange holidays in 2011.

If you are looking to private label or distribute and support the Utilities holiday insertion tool we'd be happy to discuss that.

Removing Outlook Holidays Server-Side

We get all kinds of requests on the Holiday insertion application.

One of the more recent ones is interesting enough to blog about.

The subject is the holidays Outlook client can insert for you and how to remove them SERVER-SIDE.

Turns out that the old Exchange 2003 Utilities could handle this as a matter of course, but our new version did not until last week.

Here's the slightly longer technical story about what's happening: The Outlook holiday capability inserts client-side and helpfully includes the Category "Holiday"

That's good - because I have no idea what corporate or university user needs to know when Groundhog Day is (who put this list together, a grade school teacher?).

Looking at it in OutlookSpy you can also see why the terminology "Keyword" got applied to this early on and stuck.

Anyway, in Exchange 2003 the Sumatra Utilities used only the Keyword field, but to be safer in Exchange 2007 when we moved to EWS we also used a couple of hidden fields including Mileage (not as uncommon a technique among calendar applications as you might imagine).

So we expanded the concept of UNDO to be both for Category only or Category AND Mileage.

The good news, we fixed it so if you want to remove data server-side you can.

AND REMEMBER: We require keywords so that you do not accidentally remove everything in a calendar. But you WILL remove everything tagged with "Holiday." So be careful! You have been warned.

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.