Meeting Requests on Behalf of other's via Outlook.

[BBPenguin]

Hi Guys/Gals.

When managing a Calendar on behalf of someone else, sending a meeting request to a external Exchange account eg. Secretary sends meeting request on behalf of Boss via Outlook to External Exchange user, the External Exchange user accepts the meeting, but in Zimbra ( Webmail as well as Outlook, the meeting shows as Needs Action from External Invitee[ Webmail ] and in Outlook [ No responses have been received for this meeting ].

Yet the accepted invite response is in the Secretary mailbox.

In Outlook, the invite confirmation shows as : Accepted : "Whatever the Subject of meeting was", and there's a sub heading stating This meeting is not in the Calendar, it may have been moved or deleted.

Doing the same steps as above purely from webmail works correctly.

Outlook version is 2007 using 7.1.2.6331 Connector.
Boss' Calendar is shared and Secretary has Admin rights.


Any ideas where the problem could be?

[BBPenguin]

attached is the zcolog's for the duration of reproducing the problem, from creating the meeting request > Waiting for the accept.

[ewilen]

How exactly is the secretary sending the request on behalf of the boss? I assume the secretary creates the meeting directly on the boss's calendar, yes?

Also, does this only happen for external attendees, or for internal ones as well?

I don't have time at the moment to try to reproduce but there are several outstanding issues with delegated email/calendars, particularly when Outlook is involved.

You might want to search bugzilla for "behalf" and "delegate". If nothing there matches what you're seeing, you could open a new bug. If you have access to support, you could also open a new case.

A workaround would be to have the secretary create the meeting on his/her own calendar and invite the boss as well as the external attendee.

[BBPenguin]

Well, the secretary has both calendar's open.

Then clicking in the boss' calendar, create a new meeting request, send it off to a external exchange invitee.

Exchange user replies and results as per my initial post.

Zimbra to Zimbra does not exhibit this behavior.

Attached are three screen shots showing how the Exchange response shows up, as well as how the initial meeting request is created.

[ewilen]

I can't find any open bugs that exactly describe your issue.

Bug 19283 - Acceptance mail should be sent to Grantee. seems vaguely related but it's fixed. However, it could be that the fix itself is what's causing your problem, in a sense.

[BBPenguin]

We logged a case with Zimbra, and they opened up this bug for it :

https://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=66651

Any ideas as to what would be a suitable workaround?

[ewilen]

Have the secretary create the meeting on his/her own calendar and invite the boss as well as the external attendee. Technically, this is more consistent with RFC 2446/5546 sections 2.1.3 and 3.2.2.5, since the Organizer of a meeting is supposed to receive replies to the meeting request, not a person acting on behalf of the Organizer.

If the secretary's time shouldn't be blocked out in free/busy, then either the meeting should be created on a secondary calendar which is set in Zimbra Web Client not to count toward free/busy (right-click, get properties on the calendar), or possibly the meeting could be set to "Free" on the secretary's calendar without affecting how it shows on the attendees' calendars. However, I haven't tested the latter option.