I have users in mulitple locations that have issues with using the Out of Office Setting and seeing free busy information. Using the web, logging into OWA, they are able to get the services but not through Outlook. Our network team has made some changes recently, I believe this is the source. But, to help the network team and for my own understanding I would like know more about the difference in how Outlook connects to these services from using owa through http. The environment is Exchange 2007/Outlook 2010. We do have http disabled for Outlook clients, but I did enable it for to test, and was still unable to get Out of Office to work. So, how does Outlook connect to Out of Office/Automatic Replies service different from OWA/web access? How does Outlook connect to get free/busy information different from OWA/web access?

In Exchange 2007 where outlook client is Outlook 2007/2010, It uses availibility service to fetch the free busy information. What does Exchange 2007 Availability Service do? http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2006/10/23/3395177.aspx Retrieve live Free/Busy information for E2K7 mailboxesRetrieve live Free/Busy from other E2K7 forestsRetrieve published Free/Busy from Public Folders (for legacy mailboxes or for mailboxes using legacy Outlook clients)View attendee working hoursShow meeting time suggestions Please go through the autodiscover whitepaper to understand how outlook 2007 clients get the address of available services. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332063(v=exchg.80).aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2008/09/26/3406344.aspx Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread. Hasnain Shaikh| My blogs: http://messagingserversupport.com

Hi, In OWA, user is logon into Server directly so it calls availability service directly; but in Outlook, it use availability service via the url. That is the difference. From my understanding, the Out of Office settings is available when you enable Http, right? If this is the case, I would suggest you check the settings below: Run Outlook Test email AutoConfiguration to get OOF URL; Run "Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory |FL" to get internal availability url;Verify the directory settings of /ews in IIS manager, and check if certificate is required.Check the IIS log to see what error is recorded when the issue occurs. Thanks. Fiona Liao TechNet Community Support

Fiona is right OWA uses public interface to calls the Availability service API directly to read the free/busy information. If you're having issues with Outlook users getting OOF or availability run your diagnostic at www.testexchangeconnectivity.com and post the results.James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

If no more questions on this thread, we may mark it as answered. Thanks. Fiona Liao TechNet Community Support

Yes, this can be closed. Our network team "fixed" the issue with the network resolving the issue. This is good but it prevented me from doing any further testing.