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The Problem – Hidden Outlook Reminders

In Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010, reminder windows pop up in Outlook, but they do not steal the focus if you are working in another program.  For example, if you currently working in Word or Internet Explorer, you won’t see a reminder window if one pops up, since you’re not in Outlook.

In previous versions of Windows, this wasn’t as big of a deal because you would still see the reminder window in the task bar.  So even though you didn’t see the actual window, you would see the tab for it flashing on the taskbar.

In Windows 7 however, the default grouping of same-application windows, makes is much harder to see when a reminder window pops up. For example, the image below shows a second Outlook window, which is actually a reminder window.

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At a few recent client implementations, we have seen noticeable delays synchronizing various changes in mailboxes to Exchange 2010 when running Outlook 2003 in Online Mode.  As it turns out, this is a known issue and Microsoft has documented it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009942.  The following are symptoms of the issue:

• Outgoing messages stay in the Outbox for up to 1 minute
• New messages do not arrive in the mailbox for up to 1 minute
• Items that are deleted or moved between folders may take up to 1 minute for the change to be reflected

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A common situation in organizations is to make calendars public, so that employees can see other employee’s availability, and collaborate better.  Users may also delegate rights to other users to view their messages, tasks, and contacts.  In these situations, people may rely on marking sensitive items private to hide them from other users.  In Outlook or OWA, other users will see a placeholder for the private items, but won’t be able to view any of the details.  However, you should keep in mind that this privacy is only a feature of the client application–Outlook or OWA–and is not inherent to Exchange.  Exchange itself does not support any kind of item-level security or privacy, and only has a field called “sensitivity” which is used by Outlook and OWA.  The client applications look at that field to determine whether to display the item.
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In working with a colleague, we came across what appears to be a bug within Outlook relating to meetings disappearing from calendars after an update is sent.  This has been confirmed to affect Outlook 2007 but it may affect other versions as well.

Symptom:  A meeting for which you are the owner/organizer disappears from your calendar after sending an update to all attendees if the meeting request was sent to a distribution list or group of which you are a member.  The meeting does not disappear if you are explicitly in the attendee list.

Workaround:  Before sending a meeting request to a distribution list or group, expand the membership by clicking the “plus” sign next to the name.  Once you see all of the members expanded, you may send the meeting request or remove yourself from the attendee list so that future updates will not fall victim to this bug.  I would recommend that you remove yourself entirely as an attendee in case other issues arise as a result.

We are unclear as to whether Microsoft is aware of this bug or has a fix in development. Hopefully the above workaround will help some of you that are experiencing this problem.

Outlook 2003 and 2007 support a protocol called stssync, which allow SharePoint libraries to be viewed in Outlook.  Outlook 2003 allows for read-only viewing, whereas Outlook 2007 also allows for two-way synching of certain content.  The most common way of connecting to a SharePoint library is through the SharePoint Actions menu, as shown below.
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