XFOR: Exchange Calendar Connector Free-and-Busy Searches Display Busy Time from 5:00 P.M. Through 8:00 A.M. (304726)

SYMPTOMS

When you use the Microsoft Exchange Calendar Connector to query for free-and-busy information from Exchange to Novell GroupWise during the hours from 5:00 P.M. through 8:00 A.M., Monday through Friday, all of the users may show busy time in their Calendars. On Saturday and Sunday, the whole day may also be displayed as busy.

CAUSE

This issue occurs because a setting in GroupWise specifies all of the users' working hours as 8:00 A.M. through 5:00 P.M., Monday through Friday. If you query a user in GroupWise for free-and-busy time outside those default working hours, the user's schedule is always displayed as busy.

WORKAROUND

To work around this issue if a constant busy time of 5:00 P.M. through 8:00 A.M. Monday through Friday is unacceptable and you only want to see busy time in the Calendar when users are truly busy, change the settings:

Use Netware Administrator to open Client Options in the GroupWise domain that the post office exists in.
In Client Options, click the Date and Time option.
Click the Calendar tab.
Locate the Work Schedule attribute that specifies a Start Time of 8:00 A.M. and an End Time of 5:00 P.M. and also the Work Days attribute with only Monday through Friday selected. Set the Start Time under Work Schedule to 12:00 A.M. and the End Time to 11:55 P.M. (GroupWise increments by five minutes in the calendar). Make sure that you also select all days under the Work Days attribute.

After you make these changes to the Calendar tab in GroupWise, users in Microsoft Outlook who query GroupWise users free-and-busy time see busy time in the calendar only when the users are truly busy.

NOTE: Make sure that you lock down the changes in GroupWise to prevent GroupWise clients from changing their own settings.