[Sp1d3rM@n]

Anyone seen or created a "Best Practices for delegates of mailboxes with Blackberry devices"???

We are seeing more and more VPs with delegates (often many multiple delegates) having Calendars woes. Well more that are complaining about them now at least.

Are you guys finding it better to:

1) Set in the registry such values as DisableMeetingRegeneration to 1 (I see MS has a KB article suggesting this is not a good idea) DelegateWastebasketStylevalue set to 4 ?


2) Use Outlook 2007? Does using Outlook 2007 do a better job helping avert issues than Outlook 2003?

3) Instruct delegates to use OWA/Webmail to interact with other Calendars?

I've see a lot of threads on calendar issue with delegates and was just wondering if anyone has developed a "Best Practices" type document yet.







Manage another personxxx39;s mail and calendar items - Outlook - Microsoft Office

[lprmcnit]

We have a document, but it focuses more on user behavior...things like minimizing the number of instances of Outlook they are running, minimizing delegate relationships, minimizing apppointment notifications, letting them know that each appointment notification must be accepted (if one is deleted the appointment is deleted) etc....

[Sp1d3rM@n]

If defining correct user behavior helps alleviate the problem then I'm all for that as well.

Any conversation with RIM on it and they want BES info (logs, versions, etc.), device info, and a PST of the calendar. All that is easy enough of course to provide. But then they also want an IPD backup from the device, HH logs, RFIDs, etc. which requires the device to be present. The last two complaints the user of the device was traveling and so it was not available.

[lprmcnit]

The advantage of using owa is that you bypass any caching associated with the fat Outlook client...if users have calendar errors we

1) discuss calendaring best practices with them as outlined above
2) remove problem user from cache mode in Outlook and rename *.ost file
3) get one "version" of the calendar as correct as possible, ideally the OWA version
4) do a /rset from the device to delete the old, possibly corrupt calendar from the handheld and repupulate it with the correct version from step 3
5) tell the user to take 2-3 minutes every morning to review their calendar, looking for new items, unexpected items or inconsistencies

In addition to the things above, we've found recurring appt's to be an issue...so say an appt. was every Monday from 1/1/2011 through 12/31/2011 at 830 am..then in July it changes to 900 am..you'd think you could simply change the appt...but Microsoft suggests their best practice is to delete the original appt and create a new one at the new time..another issue is the forwarding of appt's....Microsoft suggests that rather than forwarding an appointment, you get with the organizer and add the person as an attendee..that way they will be notified if the appt. changes at all... we always lets the users know that calendaring is one of the most complex operations when you add the complexity of multiple devices and (potentially) multiple delegates.

[Sp1d3rM@n]

If they must use Outlook and not OWA, is the use of OL2007 any help here over OL2003?

Our issue is seldom with individuals and their own calendars. It is almost always when one big VP has multiple delegates that much around. Besides "don't have multiple people working in a calendar" I wanted a few things to tell them... the dos and don't.

[lprmcnit]

I'm in a 2007 only client environment, so i dont'; have any experience with other Outlook versions Others may be able to comment on the difference and perhaps some more technical as opposed to behavioral things on calendar issues....If I can state my opinion, though, my experience has been that many if not most of the calendar sync issues can be corrected with user "behavior modification", and the items mentioned above. I've always found it to be best to be totally candid with executives on sync issues. My opinion is that a really big piece of the problem you described when you said,"one big VP has multiple delegates that much around'. A while back we looked in what Microsoft called their best practices for Outlook and even they suggested that the number of delegates be minimized...ideally one principle and one delegate..I undertand this sometimes isn't possible, but it is really best. When our users report an issue like this, we try and get principle and delegate to agree on a common strategy for appointment acceptance and scheduling. Good luck, I know this issue can be a real bugaboo

[Frank Castle]

One of the biggest things I've found is to ensure only one is actively updating the calendar. If you have a delegate .. you don't need to also be getting the meeting invites / updates. I've seen way too much double processing.

There is a setting in Outlook 2003 / 2007 (unsure in 2010) that you set on the primary to only send meeting notices to my delegate. This helps the above behavior. For the primaries who want to "see" and process in addition they accept things can fall off (exsp if they process from BB) and I recommend doing a resync weekly.

The other thing that impacts BB is F'n recurring meetings that admins change 100 times a week. Eventually it just becomes corrupt or the BB loses track of all the changes. I'd bump up for BES setting for hard reconcile.