Excahgne 2007
BES 4.1 sp4 MR2
Outlook 2003 (NO 2007 clients in production)
Happening to all users.
We all know that MS has changed the way OOF *works in 2007.
*OOF was a command used in the days of Microsoftxxx8217;s Xenix mail system, which set a user as xxx8216;Out of Facilityxxx8217; - ie Out of the Office
It now has a an internal OOF message and an external OOF message.
These are two seperate properties on the User mailbox Exchange.
There is a third property on the Mailbox, for legacy OOF meassages to be used by older clients such as outlook 2003 and Blackberry etc.
Normally when setting OOF on a legacy client or device, the legacy OOF propery is synchronied with the internal OOF property which is the one that is ALWAYS sent from exchange to the sender.
If you have ever had and OOF setup before in outlook 2003, this is what happens, When the blackberry tries to setup another OOF - exchange 2007 is creating a new legacy OOF and not synchrosing it with the internal OOF - so senders are getting two messages - one from the orignal message (dated as the first one setup in Oulook 2003) and the second as the correct on in the BB.
Do we have anyone who can tell me the difference in the way the BES changes the legacy OOF property compared to the way outlook 2003 changes it ? Is there one? as it wont sync with the new 2007 internal OOF property.
I have had this logged with RIM for a while, and nothing out of them.
OOF !
Last edited by contra; 11-28-2007 at 10:03 PM..
Reason: Added info
01000005A46813D9 = Exchange 2007 Internal OOF created and automatically synced with Legacy OOF
01000005A46813D4 = Legacy OOF (Flagged as enabled and content synced with OOF Exchange 2007 Internal
No matter where we enable, disable or edit Out Of Office the above circumstances are consistent i.e. When OOF is disabled the Exchange 2007 Internal OOF is deleted and the Legacy copy still exists but is not active.
During the above tests the OOF was not changed via the Blackberry device however the enable / disable state was transferred to the device correctly The text of the OOF displayed on the blackberry device showed the message that was last set via the blackberry device, in this case blank.
Now we move on to testing with Blackberry device for this mailbox.
We will now enable the OOF from the Blackberry device again.
Note the default text shown on the Blackberry when we went to enable it was blank but we changed it to identify that this change was being made via the BlackBerry Interface.
The status of the OOF is set to enabled and the Exchange 2007 Internal OOF is recreated, however the text of the Exchange 2007 Internal OOF is still as it was when enabled from Outlook 2007
The text of the Legacy OOF (Viewed via Outlook 2003) is the same as the text entered on the Blackberry device, but is no longer synced to the Exchange 2007 Internal OOF.
If outlook 2007 is left running while these test are carried out then the outlook 2007 client appears to sync back to the legacy OOF and intern back to the Blackberry device so no matter what you enter in the Blackberry device the text is overwritten by what is set in the Exchange Internal OOF, but as we donxxx8217;t normally use Outlook 2007 (only setup to run these tests) we rely on the Exchange server synchronisation of the OOFxxx8217;s to work which stops after the BES Server changes the Instance Key.
If we leave Outlook 2007 closed then the Blackberry and Legacy OOF sync correctly, however the other users continue to receive the Exchange 2007 Internal OOF message with the old text NOT synchronised with the Legacy OOF.
Any update from RIM on this? I haven't had time to play with this to try and duplicate it ... perhaps this might be addresses in SP1? I haven't searched the release notes personally however.
We are currently running a Exchange 2007 environment and have seen were we have to change the OOF in OWA in order to have the OOF Sync to the device. This has been the only way as of right now to resolve the legacy issue. We also have a lot more users to move from Exchange 2003 to 2007 and a resolution would be great.
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I live to patch, I patch to live, gosh how I hate patching.
We are currently running a Exchange 2007 environment and have seen were we have to change the OOF in OWA in order to have the OOF Sync to the device. This has been the only way as of right now to resolve the legacy issue. We also have a lot more users to move from Exchange 2003 to 2007 and a resolution would be great.
The environment is Exchange 2007 RTM, Have some testing going on I am on the 2007 server and My BES is 4.1.4.15 the other BES's which are production are 4.1.3.18. I created the OOF on the device, the OWA as well as the Outlook 2003 client were updated. Will now have to test by setting it on the Outlook client and see if it updates the BB device.
__________________
I live to patch, I patch to live, gosh how I hate patching.
The environment is Exchange 2007 RTM, Have some testing going on I am on the 2007 server and My BES is 4.1.4.15 the other BES's which are production are 4.1.3.18. I created the OOF on the device, the OWA as well as the Outlook 2003 client were updated. Will now have to test by setting it on the Outlook client and see if it updates the BB device.
So your experience is receiving two OOF messages? The experience that we have (3 known clients so far w/ SP1) is that after 15-20 mins of setting the OOF in Outlook or OWA (will double-check this again tomorrow), Exchange does NOT send ANY OOF messages to users who are on the BES servers, users on Exchange 2003, those using BIS and those without BES accounts are not effected by this.
We completed a forest to forest migration and migrated from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2007 RTM. We are also seeing this same problem with the duplicate OOF messages with new and old dates. We are currently upgrading all servers to SP1. We are running BES 4.1.4. Interestingly enough the only way we found to get by with this problem is to use OWA to set OOF messages. When done this way, everythings seems to work.
I also just read about another post about the SP1 problem, and am not looking forward to dealing with that one.
We completed a forest to forest migration and migrated from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2007 RTM. We are also seeing this same problem with the duplicate OOF messages with new and old dates. We are currently upgrading all servers to SP1. We are running BES 4.1.4. Interestingly enough the only way we found to get by with this problem is to use OWA to set OOF messages. When done this way, everythings seems to work.
I also just read about another post about the SP1 problem, and am not looking forward to dealing with that one.
Not sure if you've found further info but prior to SP1 you would end up with duplicate OOF if set via outlook 2k3. If you use OWA or outlook 2k7 you would be fine. SP1 fixes this issue but as you've read it has caused OOF to stop sending at all after about 20 minutes (at least for some of us). Luckily if you look around you'll see a post from WillFulmer that states he has a hotfix from RIM that fixes that issue and I can confirm this fix is working as we are running it in our live environment.
I joined a company here in London and inherited this same OoF issue as a result of the previous administrator installing exchange 2007 and leaving the desktop clients running office 2003.
We introduced office 2007 suite to a group of test users and a decision was made to stay with office 2003.
I have been advising the folks here for a while now to use the Exchange2007 OWA interface to modify their OoF but that gets a bit tedious after a while ;)
***Work Around***
I have another test group with Office 2003 suite installed, excluding Outlook 2003. I have installed Outlook 2007 on the test groups PC's and everything is working fine. I was lucky enough to have vlk's for Office 2007 to go around.
Desktop/Laptop
Office 2003 Professional, minus Outlook 2003
Office 2007 Outlook
Win 2k3 Server
Exchange 2007 RTM running in a (global) mixed exchange environment.
Also with exchange 2007 and the Outlook 2007 client running you will have the option to take advantage of the new exchange 2007 services available in Outlook 2007.
Exchange 2007 Out of Office - OOF !
