Q: Okay, so we don't have Macs, we've cleaned up our Blackberry administration, we've cleaned up ActiveSync, yet users are still complaining that appointments are still missing or creating duplicates, what's up now?
A: Even after you clean everything up, it's a good 3-6 weeks before complaints die down. Remember, user's appointments likely were booked 2-3 weeks ago for a meeting that was just supposed to happen, and 2-3 weeks ago things were screwed up and the appointment lost way back then, so roll forward to today, the complaint is really about a problem that happened a few weeks ago. The problem lingers for a few weeks until all historical stuff works their way out of the system, we usually find this to be 3-6 weeks before the compliants disappear.
Q: Okay, we've now waited 2 months, we're still having odd problems, do we have ghosts in our system?
A: Yes, possibly, in several instances of persistent problems we found that a previous delegate/assistant setup a bunch of Inbox rules in Outlook as well as on their Blackberry device to auto-accept appointments, or auto-move appointments that were pushed up as server-based rules. Months later, those rules were still up on the server (despite that assistant no longer working for the company) and the delegate rule was never removed and the rules never deleted, so the rules to manage appointments continue. With Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010, you can run PowerShell to view all delegates as well as view server-based rules. With Exchange 2003, it's a little harder where you have to turn on server logging and then come back a couple days later to view the logs. But effectively, don't forget about "rules" created by delegates long gone from the organization.
Q: Shouldn't Microsoft fix these problems with Outlook / Entourage / Exchange / Blackberry / iPhone / etc?
A: Well it's hard for Microsoft to fix things with Blacbkerry and iPhones, but overall the industry is heading toward processes to FIX/Minimize/Eliminate these calendaring problems. Microsoft came out with Outlook 2011 for the Mac that was a huge step forward in improving the Mac Office 2011 / Windows Office 2010 compatibility, however it's a LOT (lot!) better, but still not perfect. Beyond looking like Outlook for Windows, many of the attributes between Outlook 2011 for the Mac and Outlook for Windows have been standardized, thus getting Outlook "closer" between platforms. And as mentioned earlier in this post, Research in Motion will be releasing a long awaited update to the BES server that'll use a more secure, better method of connecting a BES server to Exchange that'll minimize the impact Blackberry has with Exchange. And as long as Apple doesn't work in more bugs to ActiveSync for their iPhone iOS, the ActiveSync functions with iPhones / iPads continues to improve with better compatibility. However, until everything is really truly working together, keeping executive/assistant pairs matched up with the same Windows or Mac platform, and same Office / client platform is currently the only way to ensure clean calendaring with Exchange.
Q: Sounds like we should move our mail to the cloud and completely do away with these Exchange problems.
A: Unfortuantely the cloud is no better than internal Exchange. If you use Exchange in the cloud and use Macs, Windows, buggy iPhones, the problems persist in the cloud (as we have painfully experienced over the past 6 weeks with Exchange cloud vendors slammed with outages caused by the iPhone bug), so the cloud doesn't fix the problem. You can always go to gmail in the cloud, although gmail doesn't have a good enterprise calendar solution for doing calendar delegates or enterprise meeting scheduling, so I guess your calendar problem goes away with gmail because you really can't do enterprise calendar delegation and sharing on gmail, but I don't think this is the solution. No need to run from the problem when there are known fixes to make Exchange calendaring reliable and dependable.
Q: Has anything changed since you initially wrote this article in the summer of 2010?
A: Yes, I've since updated this article 6-7 times (latest updated is March 2011), so I'm trying to keep this article up to date on the most curernt known information. In fact, Apple just released a new update to the iPhone/iPad iOS last week (March 2011) that addresses "most" of what I noted above as bugs we were aware of back in January/February 2011, but they did not fix a couple others. Blackberry has released a half dozen updates since I first posted this blog post, and each time their fixes solve some problems, but then create new ones. The latest version of Exchange 2010 (service pack and roll-ups) has proven stable and addressed several problems with calendaring and performance. Knock on wood that no other issues crop up with the latest release, so far, so good. Bottomline though, the calendar issues organizations run in to is NOT a mystery. While the vendors don't openly admit the problems, if you follow the trail of tech note links to each of their sites (Apple, RIM, Microsoft), they know of the problems and are fixing the issues, they're just not outright making a big deal of it as I'm sure if they did, their phones will be off the hook.
Q: Can we get to the point where calendaring is reliable?
A: Absolutely, we have made enterprise calendaring in Exchange work reliably and dependably for years for small, medium, and really really large enterprises. Once the organization understands the root cause of the problems (that I've noted above) and they put in place a process to standardize configurations for delegates, and clean up various versions of the client software, calendar problems for these organizations have gone away. Calendaring problems are not a mystery, just no one has ever clearly explained why the problems exist for organizations to put a plan in place to fix the problems. Hopefully this posting clarifies the background and will help your organization get on a road to reliable and dependable calendaring!
The author of this post is Rand Morimoto, President of Convergent Computing (http://www.cco.com) and author of the bestselling books "Exchange 2010 Unleashed", "Windows 2008 R2 Unleashed", "System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed", and dozens of other books on Windows, Exchange, security, systems management, and the like. Rand and the consultants in his company work with Exchange 2-3 years before the product's release and thus are very familiar with the underpinnings of Exchange, the quirks, and the workarounds to make Exchange work in large scale environments. Rand is also VERY familiar with Apple Mac systems, despite writing best selling books on Windows 7 and every version of Windows for the past dozen+ years, Rand uses a MacBook Air as his primary client system, Office 2011 Mac (and Mac Mail App) for his mail client(s), and uses an Apple MacPro Server to test (and demonstrate) the latest versions of Microsoft Exchange giving Rand firsthand knowledge on how to make a mixed/multi-platform environment work as expected.