Outlook 2007 and calendar (Meeting Requests)

[Nutz]

Meeting requests seem to come in and Outlook claims that there is no organizer in the email section (as well as no accept/decline buttons). If you co to the calendar and open the meeting, you have the option to accept, and it claims that you cannot accept a meeting to which you are the organizer (these requests were sent by somebody else).

This has seemed to happen for all of my 2007 users. I have since downgraded them back to 2003, but wanted to know if you guys knew about this.

I may have switched the reported organizer in my description, as it has been a week or so since I had to deal with it. This happened in both the 4.5.3 and 4.5.4 clients.

[dlochart]

Nutz,

Are you making any headway with the Outlook connector. We are seeing inconsistent behavior and are not getting much help with it. One of my co-workers put in a detailed support request for an issue and we never heard from them.

Have you noticed that if you delete all or a ton of mail from your mailbox that your zdb file does NOT reduce in size?

Have you had success with the sharing of calendars? contacts?

[Nutz]

I chose the easy way out....

I took 2007 away from them. 2003 does not seem to have problems, but 2007 was a problem.

I blame microsoft!

[dlochart]

Originally Posted by Nutz

I chose the easy way out....

I took 2007 away from them. 2003 does not seem to have problems, but 2007 was a problem.

I blame microsoft!

I need to talk to you. Every test we have done with the sharing of calendars between outlook 2003 clients using the zimbra connector has been fraught with sync errors. I am not talking about seeing exceptions in the log for syncs I mean the data is inconsistent.

I am not trying to sound funny but have you tested the following scenario?

1) User B shares calendar to user A.
2) user A creates an appointment for user B (this works great)
3) user B goes in and modifies the text of the appt. User B can see the change.
4) user A after resyncing never sees the change user B made.
5) user A changes the time of the appt. user B sees the change but the text they added to the appt is gone

This is just one example. We can create these types of issues at will. Have you tried unsharing a shared calendar?

In actuality I hope you can tell me that this all works for you. Maybe there is something major wrong on our side. We did the same as you ... we took away Outlook 2007 but we are still running Office 2007 we just installed Outlook 2003 in its place. Is this what you did or did you back out to Office 2003 entirely?

regards,

Doug

[Nutz]

Hey,

Sounds like you guys are rocking the calendars up!!!

So I havn't done a whole lot of work with the shared calendars... But try this... just for shiggles, not that it is an answer, but something to get more info.

First, see if it works in the web client. Not a "solution" but it will help to tell where things are going wrong. We'll see if it is the OLK Connector or the Calendar itself.

Also, what is meant by "re-sync"? So outlook says that it is resyncing every time it opens, but try deleting the .zdb and opening outlook and see what that does (I'm sure it will work).

Let me know how this pans out. I run a mostly Mac shop here, so setting up a testing environment would take me some time (which I don't really have at the moment)...

As far as what I did for my user... I ended up flattening his machine and starting anew. Office didn't seem so keen on the downgrade... I have a few users that have installed all of 2007 except Outlook, but I have yet to move them over to the Zimbra system...

~Nutz

[dlochart]

Originally Posted by Nutz

Hey,

Sounds like you guys are rocking the calendars up!!!

So I havn't done a whole lot of work with the shared calendars... But try this... just for shiggles, not that it is an answer, but something to get more info.

First, see if it works in the web client. Not a "solution" but it will help to tell where things are going wrong. We'll see if it is the OLK Connector or the Calendar itself.

The web client seems to work fine so i am sure it is a connector issue,

Originally Posted by Nutz

Also, what is meant by "re-sync"? So outlook says that it is resyncing every time it opens, but try deleting the .zdb and opening outlook and see what that does (I'm sure it will work).

If you wipe the zdb file it works (re-syncs) but we are talking about regular users here. The idea is to not have to be so hands on with this. When I mean re-sync I mean send-receive which supposedly re-syncs the zdb file. I think the temporary solution is to have the person the calendars are shared to use the web interface and the regular users keep using outlook.

I just WISH someone from Zimbra would chime in at fess up that the connector is still a beat product. I believe we made a mistake by using Zimbra instead of exchange as these people use the feature sets provided by exchange. The high level docs would lead you to believe it was ready

Originally Posted by Nutz

Let me know how this pans out. I run a mostly Mac shop here, so setting up a testing environment would take me some time (which I don't really have at the moment)...

As far as what I did for my user... I ended up flattening his machine and starting anew. Office didn't seem so keen on the downgrade... I have a few users that have installed all of 2007 except Outlook, but I have yet to move them over to the Zimbra system...

~Nutz

Thanks a lot. If a zimbra employee would at least say it is supposed to work properly then I might be able to look at into the Office setup situation i.e. Office 2007 + Outlook 2003.

[Nutz]

Right... I wasn't suggesting that as a workaround, just as a test. How about this idea...

Outlook 2007 has the option of opening a web calendar (ics format). Try this:

From a clean machine, install OLK2007 Set up an IMAP account for a zimbra account, open an ics calendar (https://$servername/home/$user@domain/Calendar) and see if that works.

If you were to use this workaround, you would want to set up a couple of other things as well... Let me know and I'll hook you up with that info.

Also, Outlook 2007 is a CRAZY young product. So also please try this...

On a fresh clean box, install 2003, and try the same operations. Like I said, I ended up flattening my user's box because Outlook was acting REALLY hokey.

In defense of the Zimbra Guys, they are always very on it (I actually have much better luck in the forums than the support portal).

We purchased ZCS because we don't want to support (as in My time and money) an MS product, particularly one that won't support Mac OSx and Linux clients. More importantly, come patch time, I don't want to have to bring down a server for an hour (or 4) and babysit the thing while it patches. The 5 minute ZCS upgrade is sweet, and the one time I did it during business hours (highly unrecommended, but I was still testing) none of our users even noticed.

It may feel like ZCS is still a young product (don't know when Zimbra was formed), but they have done a kickass job so far, and things are only getting better.

~Nutz

[sam]

we've fixed most of the meeting request issues with outlook 2007 and are wrapping up the sharing work now. the 4.5 connector is not suitable for use with outlook 2007, as you are determining. these items should function properly under outlook 2003.

[dworrell]

All of my meeting requests show me as the organizer and therefore no ability to accept or decline meetings.
Is Zimbra aggressively working to resolve this issue?

[alee]

Originally Posted by dworrell

All of my meeting requests show me as the organizer and therefore no ability to accept or decline meetings.
Is Zimbra aggressively working to resolve this issue?

are you using OL 2007 or OL 2003? what version of of the connector are you using? can you go to the Zimbra Web Client and right click on the meeting request and select the "Show Original" option and send that to support or post it to this thread?

thanks.