Article ID: 18145
Date: 27 September 2007

Title: GMM 5.0 Free/Busy Not Working on Device but working in Outlook

Symptom: Users on Exchange 2003 get "No availability" returned for all users when checking Free/Busy. Users on Exchange 2007 gets data that is inaccurate.

Cause: Public Folder not mounted or not replicating. Explanation from Leonard Louie:

GMM 5.0 requires a local replica of the Free/busy folder on each Exchange Server that has user mailbox. i.e. Free/Busy data folder needs to replicated to all Exchange Servers.
Outlooks uses referrals, which is not how GMM works. GMM assume there is a local replica of the free/busy data messages on the user's exchange server. This is the logic that GMM performs when a request Free/Busy data arrives on the GMM server:

1. User "A" Request Free/Busy data for a list of users.
2. Request arrives on the GMM server on the User "A" session.
   
3. GMM opens the Public Folder store session on the exchange server where user "A" resides.
   
4. GMM retrieves the name of the first user to query for the Free/Busy data. i.e User "B".
   
5. GMM opens the Free/Busy folder and searches for the Free/Busy message of User "B"
   
6. If free/busy is not set to replicated, then the called would returned no data.
   
7. If free/busy data is replicated, then the Free/Busy data will be return to the client.

Remedy: Mount Public Folder and Replicate to other Exchange servers. Please see KB 18143 for details.