Recipe9.12.Recreating the Schedule FreeBusy Folder

Recipe 9.12. Recreating the Schedule+ Free/Busy Folder

Problem

Your users can't see each other's free/busy time, so you need to recreate the Schedule+ Free/Busy system public folder.

Solution

Using a graphical user interface

Download the guidgen tool from http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/tools/2003.asp.
Open guidgen.
Select Registry Format from the GUID Format control group and click Copy. (See Figure 9-5.)
Click Exit. The newly generated GUID is now on the Windows clipboard.
Open Notepad (or another text editor) and paste in the GUID. Then edit it to conform to the format ADSI Edit requires:
- Remove all the brackets, dashes, and braces.
- If you're performing the restoration on a Windows 2000 machine, take each two-digit hexadecimal grouping and add 0x in front of it, then a space after it. For example, 123456 will become 0x12 0x34 0x56.
- If you're performing the restoration on a Windows Server 2003 machine, insert one space after each two-digit hexadecimal group. For example, 123456 will become 12 34 56.
Copy the reformatted GUID back to the clipboard.

Figure 9-5. The Create GUID window of GUIDGen

To reset the folder GUID using ADSI Edit for Windows 2000, do the following:

Open ADSI Edit (adsiedit.msc).
Find the object for the administrative group in which you're recreating the folder. The object you're looking for will be tucked away under:
```
 CN=Administrative Groups,CN=Organization,CN=Microsoft  Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=Domain,DC=com
```
Right-click the object for your administrative group and select Properties.
Click the Attributes tab.
In the Select which properties to view text box, select Optional.
In the Select a property to view text box, select SiteFolderGuid.
Paste the GUID you copied to the clipboard into the Edit Attribute text box.
Click Set and click OK.
Restart the Exchange-related services on all servers in the administrative group.

To reset the folder GUID using ADSI Edit for Windows Server 2003, do the following:

Open ADSI Edit (adsiedit.msc).
Find the msExchAdminGroup object for the administrative group in which you're recreating the folder. The object you're looking for will be tucked away under:
```
 CN=Administrative Groups,CN=Organization,CN=Microsoft  Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=Domain,DC=com
```
Right-click the object for your administrative group and select Properties.
Click the Attribute Editor tab.
Under the Attributes column, click SiteFolderGuid.
Click Edit.
Click Hexadecimal in the Edit Value As text box.
Paste the expanded GUID you copied to the clipboard into the Value text box.
Click OK and click Apply.
Click OK.
Quit ADSI Edit.
Restart the Exchange-related services on all servers in the administrative group.

Discussion

If the Schedule+ Free/Busy folder is removed, your users' Outlook clients won't be able to publish their free/busy data to the server. The Exchange system attendant won't be able to do so, either, and all clients that use it (including Outlook, OWA, and the Exchange auto-accept agent) will fail to find schedule information. The most common reason for losing this folder is simple: administrators delete it in the mistaken belief that they don't need it. The second-most common cause is because the free/busy folder is always housed on the first Exchange server in your organization. If you started with Exchange 5.5, the first 5.5 server in the first 5.5 site you set up will have the folder. When you migrate away from 5.5, if you don't correctly decommission the server according to the procedures in MS KB 152959, you'll lose your only replica of this folder. Once the last replica is gone, you have to follow the steps in this recipe to get the folder back.

To recreate the folder, you must first obtain a new globally unique identifier (GUID), a hexadecimal code that (among other uses) uniquely identifies each public folder and mailbox in an Exchange organization. When you assign a new GUID to the site folders (as you did using ADSI Edit), that forces Exchange to recreate the Schedule+ Free/Busy and offline address book folders (as well as any other system folders housed on that server). The only replicas of these folders will be on the site folder serverthe first server you installed in your Exchange organization will normally have this distinction. All other replicas of these folders will be destroyed, and you'll have to create new ones manually.

After the folder is recreated, your users may still get the dreaded "Unable to update public free/busy data" message. If this happens, it's because the site folder server attribute (SiteFolderServer) points to a server that doesn't have the actual folders on it. This usually is because you've decommissioned or removed the former site folder server. To fix this problem, follow the steps in Recipe 9.14, which also describes how to find out which server is the site folder server.