Shared Calendars Disappearing
Has anyone else noticed this?Configuration:Exchange Server 2003Office 2007 and Windows XP on all clientsProblem: Multiple users have reported their shared calendars disappearing. They will log off and back on the next day to find their shared calendars are gone. Sometimes they will restart or shutdown and the shared calendars will disappear. Sometimes they will log off, restart, or shutdown and the shared calendars do not disappear. The issue seems very sporadic.What I have tried: Installing all MS XP and MS Office updates Searching the web I found the two links below and neither makes any sense. There is nothing in the XML file about shared calendars. Some Google Groups posting that mentions items from the nav pane being stored in an XML file Another article mentioning similar information and recommends running the resetnavpane switchMy Questions:Where is the information in the navigation pane that lists Shared Calendars stored? Is it in the *.ost file? Why might this be occuring?I have not been able to find a solution but I am scouring the tubes for any answers I can find. If anyone can help me with this it would be GREATLY appreciated.Thanks for your time
April 4th, 2008 7:49pm

After some hunting we found the Shared Calendars are located in the Exchange account. We run our users in Cached Exchange mode, so this info is also stored in the ost file. Because of this we think the issue is having our users on a roaming profile, and this is corrupting the ost file. So the plan is to remove the Raoming profile and see what happens after a week. If issues still occur then we will delete the ost file and go from there.
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April 4th, 2008 11:17pm

Some of our users are having this problem as well.We are in a Exchange 2003 SP2 / Outlook 2007 SP1 environment.I am continuing to do research to see why this is happening. It could very well be a problem where there is a problem with the .ost file. The next time I have a user with this problem before we open the shared calendar again I am going to change Outlook to "online mode" and see if the calendar shows up. This should prove if it is a .ost problem or something on the Exchange servers. I don't know if this will work, but it is worth a shot.Ryan
June 25th, 2008 8:13pm

I found some information about an XML file storing your shared calendars. I have yet to locate this XML. Someone on this the forum I am referencing stated trying to open outlook.exe with the /resetnavpane switch. I will give it a try, but I am not sure if this will cause the shared calendars to stick or will it just happen again after reboot/logoff. The link to the forum post is below: http://help.lockergnome.com/office/Disappearing-People-ftopict923280.html ****edit**** I guess I should have looked into the links provide by the original poster because they also mention the XML file. I had already looked into the one that is located in "C:\documents and settings\username\microsoft\outlook\outlook.xml" and didn't find anything that stood out. One of the users that was having his problem, their XML file was exactly the same as mine and I never have this problem, so I don't know there. I am still digging.
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June 25th, 2008 10:33pm

After further testing I have found that the Outlook.xml file doesn't have anything to do with the shared calendars from what i have seen. One thing that led me to believe this is because there was nothing in the XML that said anything about shared calendars. I did some testing and completely removed the XML file from its folder and my shared calendars were still there after restarting Outlook. The XML saves everytime Outlook closes, so if you want to do testing with this file you have to remove it after Outlook is closed or your current settings will be saved into a new XML that is created when you close Outlook. This file does affect your Favorite folders though, but in the file you can see where those are under <recentlyused>. I even ran outlook.exe /resetnavpane and that removed my shared calendar, and also removed the groups i created in my calendars. My public folders calendar links did stay though, so that is good. It also reset the rest of the Nav pane back to default so any of those changes you would have made would have went back to default. I made a copy of the old XML file and noticed that /resetnavpane only changed a few things under <userdefined> i.e., the clsid for <linkgroup> and the <Lid> fields were different, but adding your shared calendars back and rearranging your Nav pane doesn't change those fields. This is why I believe the XML file doesn't have anything to do with shared calendars. It has to be saved in another file. Probably in your .ost.
June 26th, 2008 4:36pm

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