[SOLVED] frequency of free/busy updates?

[ewilen]

Suppose that User A invites User B to a meeting, and User B hasn't responded yet.

Now suppose User C wants to invite User B to a different meeting around the same time.

What I seem to have just observed is that if User C is using ZWC, then User B shows up as tentative in the Schedule tab of the Appointment.

If user C is using iCal 3.0 (with CalDAV), then User B shows up as busy in Available Meeting Times.

However if user C is using ZCO, User B's status may or may not show up as busy. If it doesn't show up right away, it seems to appear if you wait a while before creating the meeting.

Similarly if the original meeting (A with B) is cancelled, then User B's free/busy status is updated right away with ZWC and iCal, but User B may still look busy to Outlook for a while.

Just now it seemed to take about 14 minutes, while I was trying all sorts of things including closing/reopening Outlook (and deleting a local failure notice which was an hour old, seemingly not related).

(Note that User C is clicking Send/Receive in Outlook before creating the meeting, to make sure everything is synched up)

Have others observed this?

What exactly is causing this? Any way to control how rapidly the free/busy info updates for the benefit of ZCO? It is apparent that ZCO uses a different facility (the Internet Free Busy search field buried under Tools>Options) than CalDAV or ZWC.

[sam]

in ZCS free/busy is real-time. as soon as any change is made in a mailbox, that change will be reflected in any UI that show's free/busy. ZCO configures Outlooks internet free/busy client which sends requests in real-time to ZCS and renders the real-time free/busy status of attendee's.

I tried the steps you mentioned below and am not seeing any discrepancies across ZWC and ZCO wrt free/busy lookup.

[ewilen]

Thanks for checking. I'll keep an eye on this and do more tests when I have time.

[ewilen]

Well, I just got back to this...created an event for a given user via ZWC, and it didn't show up in their free/busy when scheduling a meeting with them in Outlook, for at least ten minutes.

Can you suggest what kind of debugging data I might be able to post that would help with this?

I had blown away the Zimbra profile and reinstalled, by the way. ZCS is Release 5.0.12_GA_2789.MACOSXx86 Network Edition.

EDIT: In current manifestation, it looks like quitting and restarting Outlook is enough to make it get fresh freebusy info.

I ran ZCOLogCtl and reproduced the error a few times, then I just now sent the logs to Zimbra.

[ewilen]

I think I found the answer serendipitously:

In Outlook, Tools:Options:Calendar Options:Free/Busy Options,

"Update free/busy information on the server every X minutes."

I had this set to 15 minutes.

Even though this should only affect the frequency with which the Outlook user's calendar is updated on the server, maybe it also affects how often the tokenized URL for accessing others' freebusy gets updated. When I set it to 1 minute and did a couple quick checks, things seemed to be working right.

By the way, this was after installing the Outlook hotfix mentioned at Outlook 2007 improvements in the February 2009 cumulative update - Zimbra :: Wiki and at Downloads: Outlook 2007 Update Boosts Performance and Responsiveness, so maybe that had something to do with it, but it's working anyway.