Solutions to some
common problems with the coming Exchange 2003 DST Rebaser
The
Microsoft methods for updating Time Zones for the coming DST shift will
require that meetings in the relevant time delta be re-proposed.
It does not take a lot of head scratching to realize that this will
potentially result in a lot of email traffic on your servers. It's also
reminiscent of how the dentist tells you an X-ray only gives you the same
amount of radiation you'd get during a day on the beach (conveniently
ignoring the fact that she's giving you the same does in a few milliseconds
instead of over eight hours).
So your first question is probably: How much traffic can I expect to have?
The
Sumatra Utilities (available for free) can give you the answer.
At the command prompt on your backend server run:
su /u:jsmith /DST
To get a count of all "jsmith"'s meetings and appointments in the relevant
region.
The output looks like this:
Alias Num Appts Num Recur Master Num Recur Instances Num Recur
Exceptions Total Items Total Cross Check
jsmith 12 2 19 1 34 34
The final number is the total of all affected calendar entries (meetings and
appointments) in the area.
If you choose to do only recurring meetings, look at the third number form
the left: Number of Recurring instances. Each of those will require two
emails: one coming IN to that guest and one going OUT from that guest as a
response.
The totals of these for all your users is a close approximation of the total
amount of email traffic you can expect. Why is it not exact? Two reasons:
-
If guests have DECLINED
the meetings previously then they're not on the calendar so don't count
in the totals but they will receive updates
-
Users who have been
invited but have not yet responded may not have this calendar object on
their calendars yet.
A quick look at the output file will show you it's tab-delimited so
easy to load into a spreadsheet for analysis.
This will work on resource accounts as well.
Special problems with resource accounts
So let's say you've successfully modified the Time Zones for your Exchange
Server, Outlook clients, and run the Time Zone Update Utility.
Your users haven't spontaneously burst into flame, but they are really
curious what's happened to the conference rooms.
Accepting invitations for resources
First off: If you needed to turn off your Auto-Accept agent or resource
management software, and are not running with an event sink that
automatically accepts for you, you may have some meeting invitations in your
resource Inboxes.
The Sumatra Utilities can automatically accept all of these.
Use the following syntax:
su /a /u:conf_room
to accept ALL of the invitations in a given Resource mailbox.
Note you can also use the /in:file.txt command to deal with a group (one
line per resource alias).
The Sumatra Utilities /a flag accepts the oldest email invitation first and
proceeds to the newest. Think of it as First-Come First-Served. It doesn't
look at the time of the actual event -- it looks at the time of the event
invitation.
This helps it to avoid accepting something that is out of date and replaced
by a newer item.
After doing this of course, it is very reasonable to assume that you may
have double-bookings.
Determining Double-Booking
You could open each resource and scan the calendars one day at a time, but
enterprise calendaring software is supposed to make your life easier not
harder.
To produce an output file highlighting double bookings, enter the following:
su.exe /u:conf_room /DB /ND:45
NOTE – for double bookings, the MAX DAYS (ND) is 45 days from today (you
cannot change the start date).
Also this will take the /in:filename.txt parameter.
What if the resource is Triple (or more!) booked?
How much functionality do you want in free utilities? Seriously, we handle
that -- but it will do all the cross-pairs of double-booking, i.e., if you
have triple--booked meetings "1", "2" and "3" it reports in the outfile.txt
report that "1" and "2" conflict, "1" and "3" conflict, "2" and "3" conflict
.... you get the idea.
But the good thing is that you've got it in one local place from a
relatively speedy method.
An example of part of the output file follows for a quadruple-booked case in
room "cr222":
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timer: Start=2/5/2007 5:40:30 AM (ver v2.3.18)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
User:cr222Resource Mtg Organizer Mtg Name MtgStart MtgEnd IsDblBooked
Meeting Type
Validated cr222
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 4 2/5/2007 9:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 3:00:00 PM
Double Booked with 3 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 3 2/5/2007 10:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 2:00:00
PM Double Booked with 4 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 4 2/5/2007 9:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 3:00:00 PM
Double Booked with 2 Appointment
cr222 cr222@sumatra.local 2 2/5/2007 11:30:00 AM 2/5/2007 1:00:00
PM Double Booked with 4 Appointment
