BiggAndyy the Magazine

One of the biggest reasons for switching from IMAP to Pitt’s Enterprise Exchange is to access the shared resources Outlook 2003 provides. Specifically the sharing of calendars is very useful to the departments with which I work.

Quick note: CSSD will act very swiftly to get a group of people onto Enterprise Exchange. One department was moved from IMAP to Exchange in less than 2 days! Dan and Dianna over at CSSD get Extreme Kudos for that great work!

But back to the calendar issues. The first person who was switched was a fairly knowledgeable user of Outlook and Windows based computers and added the Enterprise Exchange Server to his own Outlook Profile. Caveat Number 1: you must be running Outlook 2003 in order to take full advantage of the calendar sharing CSSD has enabled.

So we checked with the Department Administrator to make sure he had a license for Office 2003. Caveat Number 2: Pitt Faculty and Students are covered by programs that provide them licensees for Microsoft Products. Pitt staff is NOT. Make sure you have a license for Office and Windows for your computer. Department wide software audits are performed all year round by CSSD.

We now have the Enterprise Exchange added to the default Outlook profile, AND a newly upgraded Microsoft Outlook 2003 client running. We open Outlook, click on Calendar in the Navigation Pane and do NOT see the option to Share My Calendar. Arrrggghhh!

Reboot, even though Office 2003 says you don’t need to reboot after an upgrade, reboot anyway. No help.

Update, even though Office 2003 hits the Microsoft Update Server after upgrade there are updates out there AFTER the first update. No help.

Here is the situation. Since Enterprise Exchange was ADDED to an existing profile it assumed the local calendar in the .PST file was the one we wanted to use. Since it is a LOCAL calendar it is not shareable no matter how hard we wanted it to be shared. Once the problem was identified it was a simple fix to create a new Outlook Profile for Exchange. New profile, new calendar that is shareable.

You can now reopen all the stored .PST files and IMAP locations as before. But in order to share calendars the Exchange server must be the first server in the profile.

Simple once you know the secret.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Computer, Pitt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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