Meeting requests from external senders are displayed as Busy instead of Tentative in an Exchange 2007 environment

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SYMPTOMS

In a Microsoft Exchange 2007 environment, meeting requests sent by external users to users who are using Outlook 2003 clients are automatically stamped as Busy in the recipient's calendar. Instead, such meeting requests should be stamped as Tentative until they are accepted or declined by the recipient.

Note You can determine the status by opening a meeting request and looking at the Show time as field.

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CAUSE

This problem occurs because Exchange Server 2007 converts the meeting requests from the iCalendar format to the MAPI format and sets the corresponding field to Busy. Exchange Server 2007 does this because of the following line in iCalendar format.

X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:BUSY

Outlook 2003 directly uses this field value in the Show time as field in Calendar. However, Outlook 2007 converts a Busy status to a Tentative status.

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RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, download and install Update Rollup 5 for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1.

For more information about Update Rollup 5 for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

953467 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953467/ ) Description of Update Rollup 5 for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1

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WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, use Outlook 2007 as the client software.

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MORE INFORMATION

For more information about iCalendar and X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa494215(EXCHG.80).aspx (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa494215(EXCHG.80).aspx)

For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

833340 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833340/ ) How to modify the appearance and the functionality of Outlook Web Access by using the segmentation feature in Exchange 2003

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