MS tool for reporting Outlook calendar issues

Troubleshooting calendar issues is one of the pain areas in Exchange/Outlook. Always there will be ‘n’ no.of items we need to verify to identify why it went wrong. Bad thing about it is, there won’t be any logging in Exchange/MS Outlook to understand what went wrong. All you can do is enable debug logging and send the ETL files to MS support for analysis.

Well, that is a history now. MS has  a tool that can check and report problems with calendar in a given outlook profile. It can also run against mailboxes hosted on a given server. As mentioned, it is just a reporting tool, and will not fix any of the problems. Hmm, having something is better than nothing 🙂

The good things about this tool is it supports below Exchange/Outlook versions.

1. Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
2. Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
3. Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 (32-bit)
4. Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 (64-bit)
5. Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
6. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
7. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

What checks this tool does?

The Calendar Checking Tool for Outlook (CalCheck) is a command-line program that checks Microsoft Outlook Calendars for problems. The tool opens an Outlook profile to access the Outlook Calendar. It performs various checks, such as permissions, free/busy publishing, delegate configuration, and automatic booking. Then each item in the calendar folder is checked for known problems that can cause unexpected behavior, such as meetings that appear to be missing.

As CalCheck goes through this process, it generates a report that can be used to help diagnose problem items or identify trends.
Checks performed

The following Calendar-specific checks are performed and logged in the report:

•     Permissions on the Calendar
•     Delegates on the Calendar
•     Free/Busy publishing information
•     Direct Booking settings for the Mailbox or Calendar
•     Total number of items in the Calendar folder

The following item-level checks are performed and logged in the report:

•     No Organizer email address
•     No Sender email address
•     No dispidRecurring property (causes an item to not show in the Day/Week/Month view)
•     Time existence of the dispidApptStartWhole and dispidApptEndWhole properties
•     No Subject for meetings that occur in the the future or for recurring meetings (a warning is logged)
•     Message Class check (a warning is logged)
•     dispidApptRecur (recurrence blob) is checked for time on overall start and end times, not for exceptions
•     Check for Conflict items in the Calendar
•     Check for duplicate items, based on certain MAPI properties
•     Check if over 1250 recurring meetings (a warning is logged) and 1300 recurring meetings (an error is reported); 1300 is the limit
•     Check if you are an attendee and you became the Organizer of a meeting
•     Check meeting exception data to ensure it is the correct size

[Above content is grabbed from Exchange Team Blog]

Download and references:

Download Link : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28786

Exchange Team Blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/02/22/calcheck-the-outlook-calendar-checking-tool.aspx

Codeplex project: http://calcheck.codeplex.com/