The company I currently work for is building a new corporate office and as part of the move to the new building, they want to implement a new conference room booking system that will allow users to book their own conference rooms. We chose to utilize the Auto Accept agent from Microsoft which is a CDO+ event sink which triggers when a calendering item is delivered to a registered mailbox. Implementation is straight-forward and is well documented. The Microsoft Exchange Team Blog has several excellent posts to assist in troubleshooting the agent if they happen to pop up.

Anyway, I’m past the implementation of the agent and a successful pilot of the system using several of the conference rooms in the existing building. My issues start when I’ve handed the new building conference rooms over to our facilities manager and he notices that despite all the conference rooms responding correctly to meeting requests, not all of the conference rooms are showing the correct Free/Busy. I check with my Outlook 2007 client, and everything looks good to me. I know he is using Outlook 2003, which is our corporate standard.

First thought might be an issue with server-side Free/Busy replication on our Exchange 2003 back-end servers, but we specifically don’t replicate Free/Busy, we have chosen to only have a single copy of Free/Busy that all Outlook clients query. So, I’m dealing with some type of Outlook rendering issue, possibly tied to Outlook 2003 as it doesn’t appear to affect Outlook 2007. I found KB 196885 which has some good tips for troubleshooting Free/Busy but none directly apply to me. I’m still researching the issue trying to find root cause. If I come up with anything really interesting, I’ll post a reply.