free/busy \\\ erros and other wierd things

[Guest]

I’ve had several users report that they have attempted to do online meeting
requests and have attempted to use the scheduling feature to see availability
from the various attendees. Like the example below, most of the users are
coming up with the \\\\\ for their availability. Depending upon the user I
see both. The user in question, was only seeing the “no information†return.
What causes this or what can we set to ensure that the scheduler is always
online for all users. We have touted Exchange as being so much better than
the campus solutions, but our Communications director, does not need to see
what isn’t working properly.

Also this same user gets a network error that states:
An error occurred reading Internet free/busy data. Unknown/unsupported
protocol in URL: "name of owa server"

Any ideas?

 

[Guest]

You may be running into the situation where the meeting request is further
out than the free/busy is configured to publish. In each users Outlook in the
Options, Calendar Options, Free/Busy Options(bottom left corner) - it is
configurable how many months out you want to publish your free/busy
information. The default it 2 months. So if you schedule something further
out than this, the users will appear with \\\\ in the availability because
the server doesn't have the information. Incidentally, the calculation for
the month does not appear to be based on number of days. So on October 31st
you will only be able to see Octobers and Novembers availability. On Nov 1st
you will see November and December's.

If the users are all in a domain you can utilize a Group Policy to globally
set the value consistenly across the enterprise. The steps on how to do this
can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;867504