Hosted Exchange 2010 and Resource Rooms.. Cannot open the free/busy information?

I recently stumbled upon an interesting error message in outlook while configuring resource rooms in the Exchange 2010 Hosted / Multi Tenant SKU (This error also happens in non Hosted mode).

Cannot open meeting item “FW: Test”. Cannot open the free/busy information. You do not have sufficient permissions to perform this operation on this object. See the folder contact or your system administrator.

Before I tell you how to fix the problem, I need to give some background on the exchange configuration.  Firstly I have created a new resource room in ECP and selected that another user in my organization to handle the booking requests.

 

Now we have a room that is has delegate that needs to accept or decline meetings for this room. Naturally our next test is to try and schedule a meeting. This can be done in OWA or Outlook it doesn’t matter.

I have booked the meeting and in OWA I see that the Resource Booking agent is waiting for approval.

When you log into OWA as your delegate you will see that everything is fine. There are no errors.

In Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 you are not able to view the email in the preview pane, instead you get an error. You can however accept the meeting by right clicking on the item.

What's happening here is that the way we add delegates to mailboxes in Outlook versus the way we do in ECP/EMC/EMS is different. Typically Outlook will dirty the delegates mailbox if there has never been anything created in there calendar. This error will only happen if it is the FIRST meeting to be accepted in the mailbox because in the preview pane it is trying to view the non-existent free busy data and build a view. This error is not present in OWA because in the preview pane doesn’t request to pull free busy data it simply gives you a text description of the meeting (note the 3rd screen shot).

Upon the creation of the Resource Room it does not dirty the mailbox for us so this is expected behavior. All the delegate needs to do is dirty the mailbox by doing 1 of the following.

1. In Outlook go to your calendar open the resource room calendar
2. Accept a meeting in OWA, or Right click on the meeting in Outlook and accept it

After that you can return to outlook and look at the meeting and it will show the Free busy information now.

I hope this helps anyone that might run into this!

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 28, 2011
  Didn't help me.  I just created it but can book the room calendar via the resource option in the meeting.  So there is already more than the FIRST meeting available.  Just can't double click on appointments to double click on them.

• Anonymous
  October 28, 2011
  For the last part i meant to say.  Just can't double click on items to view the contents.  Totally FAT fingered that one.

• Anonymous
  September 26, 2012
  Change the view , will fix it