“As the meeting organizer, you do not need to respond to the meeting”
There is no great troubleshooting involved in fixing this but thought I would share it coz it gave me some real hard time.
Issue: Some users getting the message in Outlook while trying to respond to a meeting when they are just attendees and not the organizer of the meeting
“As the meeting organizer, you do not need to respond to the meeting”
First logical troubleshooting was to check the same meeting in OWA and was surprised to see the same message displayed. Everyone tend to follow the logic that “If the issue can be replicated in OWA, then it is a server error and not client issue”.
I can tell you – That aint right and you know why!!!
When Outlook is configured for a user, data isn’t downloaded from server to client ONLY. Outlook sync with the server and uploads some information back – Like OOF settings, Outlook rules and god knows what not.
So, the point is if there are some Outlook addin’s which are not tested and approved by the IT team in your company or which are “not recommended” in any corporate environment the user in question is bound to have problems.
In my case this is what happened. To resolve this issue, Exchange folks Moved mailbox, Disabled and re-enabled the user, Updated Outlook from 2003 to 2007 etc. Nothing worked.
This is what I noticed:
I configured the user mailbox in a different machine and opened one of the affected Meeting requests. Surprisingly the meeting status showed as “Searching for meeting update” and immediately came back stating “Approve, Reject”.
Then I flipped back at the same meeting invite in the user’s machine and waited for about 2-3 minutes and re-opened Outlook and there we go – The error is no more. It came up with “Approve, Reject”. I could replicate the same behavior for all affected Meeting invites.
So, I had the helpdesk uninstall Outlook and ensured there are no traces of outlook in the machine and re-installed a different build of Outlook than what was previously installed on the client.
Issue resolved.
Ratish Nair
MVP Exchange
Team@ MSExchangeGuru
January 16th, 2012 at 10:09 am
Ratish,
We recently encountered the exact same problem @EMC but we drilled down the problem to all the affected users having an iOS device(iPad or Iphone) which syncs with their exchange calendar & in our case even configuring outlook on a different machine was not helping .. so we had to remove the iphone from the users profile & then configure Outlook which fixed it .. did u experience any such issues in particular with iOS .
January 17th, 2012 at 9:22 am
Makes sense… Its about a user profile pushing corruption to the store level which causes it…
So, I think your step holds good… removing the device partnership will remove the traces of the device from the server and force the device to download data again… So yes corrupted mobile partnership can be a cause for this behavior. We dont have a lotta documentation surrounding this issue on MS kb’s…
I would also look for events 10xx- Source MSExchange ActiveSync on the internet facing CAS servers and backend Mailbox servers to see if we have any users mobile devices hitting the server hard.
Thank you Anupam.