Issues With Accessing Free/Busy Data From a Non-Domain Workstation

With the introduction of Exchange 2007, Microsoft introduced a new model for making free/busy information available to clients. While older, down-level clients (Outlook 2003 and older) still access free/busy by pulling it from a system Public Folder, newer clients such as Outlook 2007 retrieve free/busy information by making use of the SOAP-based Availability Service. This works quite well for most situations, thus paving the way for the eventual deprecation on Public Folders, but their are certain situations where this model is somewhat…lacking. The most common scenario where the limitations of this approach are made manifest is the case where the Outlook 2007 client is running on a workstation which is not bound to the Active Directory domain where Exchange is hosted. Unfortunately, this is a common situation for many departments in our environment.

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