To understand free and busy calendaring, it is important to understand where the calendaring information is stored, and how the information is exchanged between users.
Calendar Connector always stores free and busy information in an administrative group's public folder. If there are multiple administrative groups on an Exchange 2000 server, each administrative group will have it's own public folder. In this case, free and busy information for Exchange users may be stored in a different public folder than free and busy information for users on partner systems.
For Exchange users, free and busy information is stored in the administrative group on which the user's mailbox was first created. When storing free and busy information for users on partner systems, Calendar Connector always uses the administrative group that contains the connector. The user's free and busy information is stored in the public folder associated with this administrative group because the connector is used to import these users into Active Directory.
When an Exchange user queries the free and busy information of a partner user, Calendar Connector intercepts the query. After retrieving the requested information from the partner system, Calendar Connector stores it in the free and busy public folder. The Exchange user receives their requested free and busy information from this folder.
Note In this documentation, Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes systems are referred to as partner systems.
Similarly, when a user on a partner system queries for the free and busy information of a user on Exchange, Calendar Connector again intercepts the query. After retrieving the requested information from the Exchange free and busy public folder, Calendar Connector returns the free and busy information to the partner system.
Before queries can be handled in this way, Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes users must first be added to the Windows 2000 Active Directory as Contact or User objects. This can be done by using the directory synchronization feature of the Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes connector.
Related Topics
Communicating with Partner Systems Understanding the Status of Free and Busy Information Working with Queries Implementation Considerations