Download: Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1

Click here to download Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1. 

Some of the known issues were addressed @ Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2010 SP1:

• 2465292 "MAPI_E_FAILONEPROVIDER (0x8004011D)" error message when you access an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox by using a MAPI application

• 2394554  An email message is not delivered if it contains unsupported encoded characters in the subject line in an Exchange Server 2010 environment

• 2491951  You cannot install Exchange Server 2010 SP1 if the NetBIOS domain name of the domain controller contains an ampersand (&) character

• 2500648 "There are no items to show in this view." error message when you try to view a folder in Outlook in an Exchange Server 2010 environment

• 2533538 You cannot look up the free/busy information of a user who is located on an Exchange Server 2010 organization from another Exchange Server 2010 organization

• 2506820 The free/busy information does not display of a user whose mailbox is located on an Exchange Server 2003 server

You can get the list of issues fixed in this Rollup available here.

My First Preview : Outlook 2010 – Calendars & Inbox

I want to share couple of relevant information with respective Outlook 2010 CTP with respect to Calendars.

Outlook has adopted the Ribbon in the Inbox and all throughout Outlook.

The purpose of the Ribbon in Outlook is to help you become more efficient in getting your work done – be that processing e-mail in your Inbox (Mail Home Tab), managing your Calendar (Calendar Home Tab), or doing work in Tasks (Tasks Home Tab).

Feature called “Quick Steps” available in Outlook. It is easy-to-use one-click buttons which perform multiple actions at once. Well, you can customize that one also – if you want to make your Outlook sophisticated with the use of this new feature.

To more learn about this, you can refer the blog post about Introducing Quick Steps by Melissa Macbeth, Program Manager …

Experience with Conversation. Try with the Conversations experience in Outlook 2010, its an entirely new way to take control of your Inbox.

Certainly this will be the whole new level by allowing all of your email to look, act, and function as smart groups of related messages.

Even if you want to slim down the conversation, you can use the same conversations drop-down feature – which helps us to hide the bulkier (even if it is) conversation thread too. If you want to read more on this, you can refer the blog post “What’s up with my Inbox in Outlook 2010 from Michael Affronti, Product Manager and learn how these features were designed to help you get through your email faster than ever before.

• Easier way of create & manage meetings: If an e-mail conversation gets to a point where a meeting would be more useful, just click Meeting Reply to set up a meeting with the people involved in the conversation. It will copy the content of the e-mail conversation into the meeting request, to help keep you within the context of what has already been discussed, and add the recipients to the invitation.

Also we can try easily searching the appointments using “Search Contextual Tab”.

If you want to view the “new schedule view”, you can view multiple calendars horizontally – very effective way to help teams organize meetings. If you want to try read more on this, you can refer the blog post from Rainer Schiller, Outlook Program Manager.

• Working with Calendar Preview: Now if we want to try something with respect to Meeting requests, we can see what’s new with this version – you can feature with “Calendar Preview”. 

This shows a slice of your calendar in the meeting request allowing you to read the request and check that date on your calendar at the same time – this saves your time by combining two steps – read meeting request & see if you’re available in your calendar

If you want to learn more, you can get detailed blog post from Tom O’Neil on this. Also i request you to try checking the Microsoft Office Outlook team Official blog site to get more update about Outlook 2010 and so on.

Certainly these are some of my my favorite features in Outlook 2010, and I hope you like it too. I will keep you posted more on this…

Outlook Object Model : Why i can’t able to assign value for MAPIFolder.WebViewURL ?

One of my customer had created an Outlook Add-in using VSTO & Outlook Object Model (OOM). As per the business logic, he need to implement the WebViewURL in it. The MAPIFolder.WebViewURL works fine and take’s us to set value to it most of the times, but it doesn’t function as expected in some time; the strange thing is it’s not throwing any error or exception when we execute the code.

//[Code Snippet : C# , VSTO, Outlook Object Model (OOM)]

...

//Provide the non-default store path

String pstPath = @"providelocalpath like c:personals.pst";

MAPIFolder _pstFolder;

//Add the PST

this.Application.Session.AddStoreEx(pstPath, OlStoreType.olStoreDefault);

_pstFolder = this.Application.Session.Folders[2];

//Provide PSTFolder Name

_pstFolder.Name = "SampleFolder";

//Set the values

MAPIFolder mf = _pstFolder.Folders.Add("MyHtmlView", Type.Missing);

//Assign value for MAPIFolder.WebViewURL

mf.WebViewURL = "http://www.microsoft.com";

mf.WebViewOn = true;

...

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MAPIFolder.WebViewURL Property (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook) Returns or sets a String (string in C#) indicating the URL of the Web page that is assigned to a folder. Read/write.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.outlook.mapifolder.webviewurl.aspx

When we start troubleshooting the case, we found that the issue happens for the non-default stores.

During research we found couple of community blog post references, Randy & Ryan’s MS Press book that with respect to Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, the home page setting is disabled for non-default stores. Non-default stores can include Personal Folders files (.pst) or the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services folders. These folders are also stored in a .pst file. To see the home page setting for a non-default store, right-click the store in the Navigation Pane, click Properties, and then click the Home Page tab.

By default, you cannot type or paste a URL in the Address box. This issue occurs because, by default, home pages are disabled for non-default stores. To overcome this issue, we don’t have any programmatic resolution; but we can implement the resolution by refer the following support KB.

Gotcha : Appointment created with WebDAV is not getting displayed in Outlook?

Issue:

One of my customer updated me that he created an appointment by using WebDAV. But the user has the following issues when he tries to view the mailbox owner’s calendar:

• The appointment does not appear when Microsoft Outlook is in the Day, Week, or Month view.
• The appointment appears correctly when the appointments are sorted by category.
• The appointment appears correctly when the delegate user views the appointment by using Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA).

Why it’s happening?
Later when we started probing we found that the specific appointment doesn’t have dispidrecurring property or it is missing. This issue occurs if you do not explicitly set the dispidRecurring MAPI property in your program. When a schema name in your program is not specified, Outlook makes assumptions about the schema properties. Therefore, appointments that you create programmatically may not appear consistently when they are viewed in Outlook

Resolution:
To resolve this issue, specify the dispidRecurring property in your program as specified in the article, like, we need to include the data type namespaces, "xmlns:dt=""urn:uuid:c2f41010-65b3-11d1-a29f-00aa00c14882/""" in our WebDAV code.

But make sure, that we don’t fell prey to complex calendaring by setting dispidRecurring property as TRUE along with WebDAV, like by doing, "<mapi:0x00008223 dt:dt=""boolean"">1</mapi:0x00008223>". This excerpt sets the MAPI property to 1 (TRUE) to create a recurring appointment. To create a non-recurring appointment, set this property to 0 (FALSE). As the complex calendaring is not supported with WebDAV, you can refer the following article or the support KB, why complex calendaring is not supported and what is supported with WebDAV.