I am using Exchange 2010. I have a bunch of Exchange Contacts that I want to be able to get free/busy information for. Is the only way to do this through publishing the free/busy through shared folders? Is there a way to programmatically provide this information to the Availability Service? I was really excited when I saw the support in Outlook for IFreeBusySupport and I thought I could write a free/busy provider for SMTP and all would work. But that is not the case, an Exchange contact will use the EX address entry and not the SMTP address entry. The free/busy provider for SMTP only is called if the address typed in is unknown to the Exchange server (i.e. not an Exchange Contact), to me this is pretty useless. Any help or suggestions are appreciated.

Hi, There is actually a couple of ways: Through Federation: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335047.aspx Through organization relationship: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351260(EXCHG.140).aspx Leif

Thanks, but neither will help for my situation. The external contacts are not using Exchange, they are true external contacts, but I know the free busy for them. Any ideas?

Hello, How about using Internet Free/Busy (IFB). How to use the Internet Free/Busy feature in Outlook http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291621 Thanks, Simon

Is there other setup besides what is on that link? I know I need to put the contacts free busy there, but is there anything I need to do so that Outlook uses this instead of the Availability Service? I tried this but Outlook is still going to the Availability Service to lookup the free/busy for Contacts even if I have the contact calendar saved.

How to Set the Global Free/Busy Search Path for All Contacts ======================================== For Outlook 2007: 1. On the Tools menu, click Options. 2. On the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options. 3. Click Free/Busy Options, click the Permissions tab and then click Other Free/busy. 4. Under the Internet Free/busy section, in the Search locations box type the fully qualified path to the location that you want to search for the free/busy information. You can use any valid URL format, such as: http://... , file://\\... , or ftp://... . Outlook supports %NAME% and %SERVER% substitutions. The following is an example of using these substitutions: ftp://%SERVER%/Freebusy/%NAME%.vfb In an Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) address, Outlook replaces %NAME% with all the characters before the at (@) symbol and replaces %SERVER% with all the characters following the @ symbol. 5. Click Ok to exit. Thanks, Simon