Free and busy information for a resource must be re-posted in the calendar after a cross-site mailbox move in Exchange Server 2003

After a cross-site mailbox move of any mailbox in a mixed-mode environment, an authorized user must perform a calendar action to re-post free and busy information for resource mailboxes. In this situation, a mixed-mode environment includes computers that are running Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 and computers that are running Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.

When you use the Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1 cross-site move functionality to move mailboxes across mixed-mode sites, the free and busy calendar information is not available for the user whose mailbox was moved.

This behavior occurs because after the cross-site move is completed, the mailbox's LegacyExchangeDN attribute in Active Directory and the mailbox's obj-dist-name attribute in Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 are changed. Therefore, the free and busy information in the source site does not refer to the moved mailbox. New information must be published in the destination site so that the free and busy information is available for the mailbox that was moved.

After the cross-site mailbox move, when a user performs a calendar action such as creating or accepting a meeting request, the user's free and busy information is posted to the destination Exchange servers. After the calendar is changed, the free and busy information is updated fifteen minutes after the user logged on to the mailbox.

The free and busy information of a resource such as a meeting room is not updated until a change is made to the resource mailbox calendar. Because the resource is not a person and does not log on to the Exchange server, someone who has access to the resource mailbox must open the mailbox and perform a calendar action to re-post the free and busy information. For example, the user who has access to the resource mailbox must approve, remove, or create a calendar item to re-post the free and busy information for the resource.

There is an unsupported tool named UpdateFB that you can use to repopulate the free and busy information of each mailbox quickly and automatically. The UpdateFB tool adds an appointment to the calendar of all affected users. This publishes new information to the destination mailbox. To obtain this tool, contact Microsoft Product Support Services.

Important Microsoft does not support the UpdateFB tool. Using this tool may corrupt your free and busy information. Microsoft cannot guarantee that problems that are caused by the UpdateFB tool can be fixed. Use this tool at your own risk.

For additional information about how to obtain and use the UpdateFB tool, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: