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singebad Author

Level 1

0 points

iOS6, iDevices, and strange Outlook/Exchange Calendaring behavior

Is anyone else seeing this issue???

About a week ago we started receiving reports from our executive assistants in regards to strange Outlook calendaring behavior where meeting cancellations were being sent out, but not from the meeting organizer, but one of the meeting attendees. A few details:

The meeting cancellations from the attendee (let's call this person User B) has confirmed they were not in their Outlook calendar, nor were they modifying any calendar related events from their PC or their iDevice(s).
User A (the original meeting organizer) does not receive the meeting cancellation notice, but all other attendees do.
When the cancellations are mistakenly sent out from User B, MULTIPLE cancellations are sent, meaning there are literally 10-20 cancellations sent for the same meeting.

We're running Exchange 2010 SP2 with Outlook 2010.

These reports seem to have started with the release date of the iOS6 update.

We have not patched Exchange/Outlook recently nor have made any other changes to the environment.

I have a case open with MS Support and am waiting for a call back.

Anyone else seeing this??? I searched the Apple Support forums but wasn't seeing this exact issue.

Posted on Sep 28, 2012 11:20 AM

27 replies

singebad Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 11, 2012 11:09 AM in response to mrben09

Yeah, for a while now we have communicated to our users to not perform calendaring functions from their iDevices (view-only) ... so many of them are using Outlook 100% for calendaring, yet the issue still occurs. Using Outlook exclusively may mitigate the issue, but it is not a valid workaround for this issue in my opinion.

In many of the cases we've seen, no intervention was performed by the user at all. They just happen 'automatically'. The user is not in MS Outlook or on their iDevice. In every case, the users are on iOS 6.

vadion

Level 1

0 points

Oct 14, 2012 7:17 PM in response to singebad

Hi,

Having the same issue here, started roughly a week ago with users on Iphone and IOS6.

One of our VIP accidentally cancelling a big meeting for a large group. It turned out the VIP has been made an organiser of the meeting. The VIP is pretty cluely and alert and been letting me know of any calendar invites where the VIP been made organiser of. I found an article earlier on to change the meeting back via MFCMAPI.

However today, we have 2 more users, both are VIPs. I can't be changing calendar meeting back to what it was and they defintely would not be happy to have to pay attention whether they been made an organiser or not.

Raised a ticket with Apple today, 361 470 198. Been also trying to call one of the account manager we've been talking to with other issues with Idevices (Calendar disappearing, Calendar duplications), but havent been able to get in touch with the person.

We're on Exchange 2010, SP2, Rollup 4.

cheers

atlauren

Level 1

0 points

Oct 14, 2012 7:44 PM in response to singebad

singebad,

I'm chasing a theory that this is actually an iMIP/iTIP issue in Exchange, and not necessarily an iOS issue.

We had a similar event occur at my site. In this case it was between two Exchange installs, on different GALs. Both orgs are on Exchange 14.2.247.0, on CAS and Mailbox servers. The user who sent the cancel was invited via a valid SMTP address that happened to *not* be his windowsemailaddress.

For the users who issued cancel:

Are they on the SAME Exchange org and GAL as everyone else?

Was the invitation sent to their windowsemailaddress?

(Or perhaps another proxyaddress? or a valid Sendmail address that is NOT their windowsemailaddress?)

-Andrew

higher ed IT guy

singebad Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 15, 2012 10:16 AM in response to atlauren

atlauren,

We are only running one Exchange org here, although we do have co-existence in place to a degree, with E2007 and E2010 in production. No mailboxes reside on the E2007 side at this time.

At one point, when I was working with MS Support, they mentioned this issue was related to co-existence of Exchange versions, but admitted they were able to reproduce the issue on a single E2010 server deployment.

The official workarounds for this, per MS TAM:

Workaround

NOTE: These are long standing “best practices” recommendations for Outlook and Calendar best performance. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924470.

1. Update the delegate and manager pair to the same version of Microsoft Outlook. The version should be Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2 or a later version.
2. For Exchange Server 2007 and 2010, enable the Calendar processing on the server per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309185.
3. For managers, make sure that only the delegate receives the meeting requests and responses.
4. In addition, we recommend enabling the Exchange Calendar Repair Assistant (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424432.aspx).

To configure this feature, use the following document:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee633469.aspx

If it is currently not enabled for all users, and you want to implement for a single user at a time for testing, use the following document:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee633473.aspx

Has anyone tried Step 2 or Step 4 above? I'm not sure what the impact of enabling the Exchange Calendar Repair Assistant for our affected mailboxes would be, but intend to perform some testing soon. Has anyone used this?

JKMonty

Level 1

4 points

Oct 23, 2012 3:05 PM in response to singebad

I've been troubleshooting this issue as well and have found that in all cases where we have seen this behaviour the user/iphone that sends the cancelleation has been setup via Active Sync and also is configured to sync Mail, Calendar, & Contacts to iCloud. When turning off iCloud the problem seems to go away.

singebad Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 1, 2012 10:32 AM in response to singebad

iOS 6.0.1 available for download!

Release notes:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1606

MindyK

Level 1

14 points

Nov 2, 2012 8:50 AM in response to singebad

Has anyone tested the iOS 6.0.1 update with this issue yet? We had one delegate update her phone and subsequently receive a ton of meeting cancellation notices from Exchange. I don't have details yet on whether the people whose calendars she manages have updated their devices or whether this was a meeting previously affected by the issue.

Thanks,
Mindy

Nov 2, 2012 8:59 AM in response to MindyK

The Apple release notes seem grossly understated on exactly what they fixed. Has anyone seen some specifics? Not ready to declare victory yet...

0xG

Level 1

0 points

Nov 20, 2012 3:09 PM in response to singebad

The Exchange team seems to be somewhat aware of this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/10/23/ios6-devices-erroneously- take-ownership-of-meetings.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

It's not just an iOS problem...

Clif H

Level 1

119 points

Nov 20, 2012 3:15 PM in response to 0xG

Looks like that article refers to iOS version 6.0, not the most recent 6.0.one that was supposed to have fixed the organizer swap issue. I never saw that issue so cannot confirm/deny its fix.

Apr 25, 2013 10:48 AM in response to singebad

was this resolved? we are having a user with the same issue?

singebad Author

Level 1

0 points

Apr 25, 2013 10:58 AM in response to jaimeking76

Yes, this is an iOS 6 bug. Update your device(s).

iOS6, iDevices, and strange Outlook/Exchange Calendaring behavior