Overlooking the world of SBS2003 and Office Systems 2003

What we need

We want all users in the group to be able to drop Appointment items into our target folder.  Further, we want our Event Agent to be able to extract the relevant properties of the Appointment Item from it and stuff them into the SQL7 database.  Ordinarily, we would say to ourselves, "Everybody can access the public folders.  Lets create one of those, and call it PubCal."  If we do that, then a knowledge base article raises its ugly head and bites us.  If only it would.  Actually, what happens is that you create the public folder, then code up the script for the Agent, install it, and begin testing.  You get an error when you try to use the StartTime Property.  And the EndTime property.  And just about any other property of the Appointment item you care to save.  You can get the Subject property.  But that isn't enough.  You put a message in your favorite Compuserve forum.  No responses.  You put a message in the Microsoft Exchange Application newsgroup.  No responses.  You put a message in a private mail list frequented by Exchange gurus.  No bites.  Finally, you go to www.CDOLive.com and leave a message there.  You finally get a response.  Siegfried Weber says he will look at it over the Thanksgiving holiday, as they don't have that holiday there and he needs something to do.  Finally, he replies, saying that it is a known problem.  There is the a KB article--the one that is still biting your butt.  You can't do this in a Public Folder.  You have to use a default calendar folder from a full, Exchange user account.   Now, that option had been explained in the material you had found on CDOLive, and you had decided it was just way more complication than was needed when it also said that you could run event agent scripts in public folders.  Unfortunately, it does not tell you about this kb article that raises its ugly head and bites your butt when you choose the uncomplicated route of using mere public folder as the container of your appointment items.  You might want to look at our friendly biter just to verify the details.

When you install an event script on a Calendar folder to process appointments, AppointmentItem-specific properties such as Location, StartTime, and EndTime can not be retrieved. Attempting to do this results a VBScript runtime error:

'800a01b6' "Object doesn't support this property or method"

CAUSE

EventDetails.MessageID returns the EntryID of a Message object instead of an AppointmentItem object.

Down with Public Folder PubCal and Up with SBS user PubCal

Back I went to the Exchange Management Console and deleted the Public Folder I had created with the name PubCal.  The temptation is great to then create a new Exchange user named PubCal, while you are in the console.  Don't you dare!  Remember, this is SBS4.5 still, and you might lose your SBS Console if you muck things underneath it.  So, exit the Exchange Management  console,  and call up the SBS Console, and create a user named PubCal, and say not to install software to it.  Then go to your workstation and create a profile for user PubCal.  Then log onto that computer as PubCal and connect to the SBS server, giving it only the Exchange service with the mailbox of PubCal.  All the people who have been there before me, and now you, warned me to do all development of the Agent script in this alternate Profile, because if something goes terribly wrong, it will be much easier to jettison this single purpose profile, than your usual user profile. 

Now that you have logged in to the PubCal user, and connected to Exchange using the PubCal profile, there is a Calendar folder in the PubCal mailbox.  This will be our public, full-service calendar folder in which we will build our Exchange Event Agent script.

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Last modified: October 31, 2003