The free/busy availability services roars it's ugly head again !

When clients are inside of the firewall, free/busy and suggestions inside of Outlook work. When clients go outside, the availability information is being retrieved (I see that someone is available or not) but suggestions cannot be provided because free/busy data could not be retrieved (I SEE the data being retrieved for crying out loud !).

Now even the remote connectivity analyzer tests all report success, so I have no idea what to do now. The only thing left is blame forefront TMG, although I run this exact same setup for another few companies with the same TMG setup and here it does work correctly.

What is especially mindbreaking is the fact that free/busy information is being picked up, (I can see people's availability inside the planner), it is just that suggested times is not working. No idea why this one claims it can't retrieve data as it is clear that data is being picked up ?

Now as I said, all the remote connectivity analyzer test report success (including Synchronization, Notification, Availability, and Automatic Replies test) I clearly see data being retrieved, yet the client still won't load suggestions, is this functionality looking at something else ?

Hello,

Please check if the issue occurs when you use outlook online mode.

I recommend you use test e-mail autoconfiguration to check your autodiscover.

When outlook is running, click the CTRL key and then right-click the outlook icon in the system tray and then select "test email autoconfiguration"

And use test-outlookwebservices cmdlet to verify the autodiscover service settings.

Test-OutlookWebServices

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124509(v=exchg.150).aspx

If a user has the issue, I recommend you make sure his outlook version. If the user uses outlook 2010, please refer to the following kb to check the result.

Description of the Outlook 2010 hotfix package

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553911

If you have any feedback on our support, please click here

Hi there thanks for the suggestions. Of course I already did all of the above and even ran ALL of the remote connectivity analyzer tests. (and all of these test were completed successfully)

These test of course make more sense in my case than test-outlookwebservices as inside the firewall everything is correct, the problem lies with people that are outside the firewall.

Now for free busy information, the availability service URL is the one that is used, and this one was set correctly (and in fact free/busy was being retrieved). The same URL is also used for out of office (which also worked correctly) and I suppose for mailtips (which also worked correctly). The only thing not working is the suggestion stuff. Now I did notice that the ECP (Exchange control panel) was using the interal URL. Further investigation into the ECP virtual directory showed the external URL was blank. After setting it to the relevant extranl URL, suggestions are also working correctly.

So indeed after all is said and done, this was an autodiscovery problem, and I have learned that availability information is using EWS, whilst suggestions is actually using ECP :)