Cannot directly book a resource for this meeting - Public Folders!?

[Cstorms]

In a 2007 setup with legacy 2003 still powered on but with no mailboxes and pf store dismounted. The error came up after dismounting the public folder store on 2007.

Why would this be required to be mounted when users are scheduling appts with resource mailboxes on Ex2007? After 3 users had the issue, remounting instantly solved it....

Extremely confused at this point. Thanks for looking!

Cory

 

[58sniper]

Look at which PF store the mailbox databases are pointing to.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Cstorms]

Thanks for bringing that up Pat, indeed it was setup to point to the dismounted store. I think I am confused as to why this would matter however? Is it not accurate to think that these resource mailboxes (for that matter everything else) do not need to utilize Public Folders anymore as long as clients are all Outlook 2007?

If I was to remove these entries would this alleviate this issue? Would it make it permanent?

Cory

 

[Cstorms]

lab environment test

Ex2007 - No public folders
Outlook 2007 sp1

Test procedure to replicate issue:

New Appointment, used scheduling assistant

"add attendee" <resource room> - sent - worked fine

"add room" <same resource> - send - "Cannot directly book a resource for this meeting"

--------

Adding a new set of public folders did nothing to alleviate this problem. Remounting however in the production environment the PF db that got installed and replicated to from the legacy system fixed the same problem.

Thoughts?





Cory

 

[Cstorms]

Question:

I was digging further and found that autodiscover had not been setup correctly (all the referring urls were pointing to the Ex2003 fqdn, I assume because that is the CN on the certificate which was the old server but is still being used on both the Ex2003 OWA site and the Ex2007 CAS).

If this is messed up will Outlook clients fall back on looking at public folders even if they dont actually pull any data from them? Could that cause really weird things such as the above to possibly happen in your experiences?

Cory

 

[Cstorms]

After search threads, I finally found the answer. Unfortunately its kind of not that awesome for those of us who want to just completely ditch PF for whatever reason.

"Hi,



I agree with Lasse that the issue occurs because the Free/Busy message in the Public Folder store cannot be accessed. As I explained in my previous post, when you add resource room to meeting request by using following method in Outlook:



1. Create Meeting Request in Outlook

2. Click To button and add Resource room to the Resources



The Outlook will connect to the Public Folder to check the related Free/Busy message of the Resource Room Mailbox in order to know whether direct booking has been enabled on the Resource Room Mailbox. If the Free/Busy message is not accessible, the error “cannot directly book a resource for this meeting” will be received. I am able to reproduce the issue on my lab if I dismount the Public Folder store.



Mike
"

Cory

 

[58sniper]

You don't NEED PFs if all users are using Outlook 2007 or later. Period.

If they are all 2007 or later, and you configured your resource accounts as rooms, then it works fine. You just have to configure the settings for how the rooms will handle requests.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/05/14/438944.aspx

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/