Shared Calendars Disappearing From Outlook 07
Tagged with: MS Exchange • Outlook • Technical • work
Problem:
Multiple users have reported their shared calendars disappearing. They will log off and back on the next day to find their shared calendars are gone. Sometimes they will restart or shutdown and the shared calendars will disappear. Sometimes they will log off, restart, or shutdown and the shared calendars do not disappear. The issue seems very sporadic.
Configuration:
- Exchange Server 2003
- Office 2007 and Windows XP on all clients
- Clients running in Cached Exchange Mode
What I have tried:
- Installing all MS XP and MS Office updates
- Searching the web
- I found the two links below and neither makes any sense. There is nothing in the XML file about shared calendars.
- Some Google Groups posting that mentions items from the nav pane being stored in an XML file
- Another article mentioning similar information and recommends running the resetnavpane switch
Possible Solution:
The information for the list of shared calendars a user is connected to appear to be stored in the Exchange account for that particular user. Which means this information is also stored in the OST file locally. So the most likely scenario is the OST file is somehow corrupt.
Well our users have a Roaming User Profile (RUP). Their local user account folder on the computer is replicated to a server, and the information is snyc’d. So our best guess is the RUP setup is screwing up some files. We will be removing this setup from one user’s account to see if it has an affect as we no longer have a need for RUPs.
UPDATES:
05/09/2008 -
Good news with the RUPs, our control group (the user with the RUP) just reported having her shared calendars disappear. Our test group (the user without the RUP) has yet to report the shared calendars disappearing on her. So we will now remove the RUP from our control user and see what happens. I will keep anyone reading this post up to date!
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April 28th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Although I can’t provide any more solutions than you already posted, I’ll be interested in some of the responses you get as we are having the same exact problems in our environment.
We do not have RUP and we have the same problems - so i’m not sure that your problem is caused by the RUP syncing messing up the OST files. I have recreated the OST files in an attempt to fix the problem but it does not.
I’m hoping this problem will go away once we migrate to Exchange 2007 but that will not occur for another 6-8 months.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Hey Drew! Thanks for stopping by and commenting. Sorry it took me so long to respond. Here’s what I got…
We have removed the RUP on one account that was problematic and are waiting to see what effect that has. We did a control group though and so far both groups had the same effect. No problems. So needless to say I have no idea what is fixing the problem.
But I suspect network hiccups (that happen from time to time with TCP/IP) are causing something to become corrupt.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Well our control group (a user with an RUP) is still having the Shared Calendars disappear. And our test group (the user we removed the RUP on) has yet to report the shared calendars have disappeared. So our next step is to remove the other user’s RUP and see if she reports any problems.