Cannot Accept Meeting Invitations

[Bandito]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: intel
Email Client: Exchange

I've seen a few other posts from members seeming to have this same issue, but so far no resolutions.

I recently set up a MacBook Air with Office Mac 2008 and configured Entourage to work with our Exchange 2003 (with all relevant patches applied) server. All seems to be working except for meeting invitations.

When a meeting invitation comes in, it is viewable, but the Accept and Decline buttons are grayed out. There is no way to take any action for the invitation. Any ideas??

Also, is there any way to eliminate or hide the annoying Synchronization window? Ughh!

 

[ATP]

I am having the same problem. Any responses?

 

[Carol Leung]

Which version of Entourage 2008 do you use? Is it 12.0.0 or 12.0.1?
About the meeting invites, are they recurring or one time only?

Thanks
Carol Leung

a-carolATmicrosoftDOTcom
Microsoft Entourage Test
Disclaimer: This mail is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights.

 

[Bandito]

Carol,

Thanks so much for responding! We are using the latest version, 12.0.1. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what can and cannot be accepted. On this particular machine, we now get an occasional invite that can be accepted, but they are very few and far between. One of them that was acceptable was an update to a single occurrence of a recurring meeting.

I finally brought in my MacBook from home and configured it the same way and have had no problems accepting meetings on my machine. I will be reviewing permissions between this user's account and my own to see if there is anything to be found there.

If I can't find anything, as much as I hate to do it, I think I'll uninstall Office, delete all the associated files and reinstall to see what happens. It'll mean going through the laborious initial sync again, but it may be my only option.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or there is anything else worth looking into. If I learn anything new, I'll be sure and post it here.

 

[Bandito]

Another Update

I finally received a meeting invitation today that couldn't be accepted. This was a single event type of meeting.

What I normally see in the preview pane for an invitation is a yellowish status bar underneath the address information and above the preview that contains hyperlinks (blue, underlined text) for 'Accept', 'Decline', and 'Tentative'. If the invitation is actually opened up, it will have the 'Accept', 'Decline', and 'Tentative' buttons in the upper left corner to choose from.

What I saw on this invitation was no status bar in the preview pane, and when opened, the 'Accept' and other buttons were grayed-out and couldn't be clicked. I went back to the Inbox and right-clicked on the invitation in the message list to check properties and found that I was able to 'Accept' it, or any of the other options, from there! Kinda weird.

This doesn't seem like a permissions problem, but I'm open to whatever suggestions someone may have.

Could this be an issue of where/what originated the invitation? We currently have a mix of Windows versions of Office 2003 and Office 2007. I'll see if I can track down which version of Office originated the invitation above that wasn't working normally.

Thanks again for any direction that you can provide.

 

[Bandito]

Further Information

Well, it appears that the sender's version of Office was a bust. I couldn't think of a reason why this would make a difference and have now received an invitation from both Outlook 2003 and 2007 that had the grayed out 'Accept' and other buttons.

Another behavior that has popped out at me is when creating a new e-mail message and entering the addressing pop-up, the 'Add' button, as well as the 'Minus' and 'Check Names' buttons, which make sense not to be active at this time, is grayed out until one address is added. This seems a bit counterintuitive to me, but may be its normal behavior.

Anxiously awaiting any further communication...

 

[Carol Leung]

Thanks so much for providing these information. It definitely will help my
investigation! I am looking at some of the reports that we have on a similar
issue. Two more questions:

Is the message body of the invite displayed as blank?
Is at least one of the invitees on the meeting request has a display name
which includes double quotation mark and parenthesis?

 

[Carol Leung]

One suggestion: maybe you can try switching to a new identity or as a new
user in the OS. Sometimes the problem goes away after switching to new
identity/user.

 

[Bandito]

I'll try creating a new user ID in OS X when I get back to the office next week.

I reviewed the invites and some had text in the body and some didn't. There was no pattern to which ones we could accept or not. I found some of the invitees had parentheses in the name, but did not see any double-quote marks.

Another interesting thing that I've found now that I've used it a bit more, is the Invites that have the grayed-out accept buttons and can only be accepted by right-clicking on them will notify the sender that you've accepted, but does not add the meeting to my personal calendar. It just vanishes!

Also, we have a shared company calendar where we normally schedule meetings so that they can be seen by all. If I go to the company calender and schedule a meeting, it does not show up in the company calendar at all. It merely sends the invites out as if I sent them directly from my calendar.

I'm having a really rough time believing that Microsoft thinks this is "functional" software and is ready for business/enterprise use. I know that Exchange uses some proprietary interfaces, but they are Microsoft's proprietary interfaces, after all, which you should have full access to for creating complete Outlook functionality in your Mac client.

I'm beginning to think that it's time to investigate other e-mail server applications.

Sorry for the rant, but everything else on the Mac seems to work so smoothly, then this comes along. <Sigh>

B.

 

[Carol Leung]

Thanks for the information! This sounds like a permission issue to the
calendar. As I mentioned earlier, please try creating a new user or a new
identity. Sometimes this kind of issue goes away after using a new
user/identity.

About the issue of invites not showing up in the calendar after you accepted
it, maybe you can try searching it in Calendar search box.

Thanks

Carol Leung

a-carolATmicrosoftDOTcom
Microsoft Entourage Test
Disclaimer: This mail is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights.

 

[Hanzo]

Count me as another with the issue of not being able to accept of decline invitations. And it worked with the old version of Entourage.

So now you are telling me to create a new user? And what of the files, setup, customization, etc. that I have done on my only user at the time? This really sounds like a BS way to "fix" the issue. I am more likely to try to return this software for the last version that did work that completely re-work my login on my Mac. MS, are you actually working on this? Or just giving advice like "try a different user".

Amazing how everything works on this machine except the MS software.

[end_rant]

 

[Hanzo]

OK, here is something to add to the mix.

I had someone invite me to something and again had no use of the accept/tentative/decline buttons. Could right-click and this time chose accept with comments. When I did this it brought up the email window and ***the to: field was populated with an empty address***. It had the little blue dot with no name (of the gal that invited me). For giggles I added her name (while doing this the email window figured out that the first to: field was empty and got rid of it) and sent the comment. Doing this resulted in the test populating my calendar.

Remember that accepting with right-clicking usually results in the meeting disappearing altogether. Only time will tell if this will work long term.

My second try with this method resulted in the event populating but did also show the address of the inviter in the comment email.

MS peeps, please add this bit of info to your investigation. This is something that I use all day every day and its dysfunction is most annoying. Calendaring is one of the major reasons to use this over, say, the Mail.app.

I am still amazed that a company that sells this to corporate users can release such buggy stuff (tho MIS suggests this should not surprise me).

Hanzo

 

[Diane Ross]

So now you are telling me to create a new user?

Creating a new User in System Preferences and testing in a new blank version
of Entourage is an established testing method. This quickly eliminates any
problems in your User's folder or your Identity. If it works there then you
can start eliminating sources in your User's folder.

Troubleshooting Your User Account for a Problem

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/test_user.html>

 

[Hanzo]

OK, I will build a new user for troubleshooting, tho just the initial sync will be an all-night process given the size of my email box. I CAN say that rebuilding the dbase did nothing for the problem.

Finder would not let me copy the dbase, btw, as per the instructions on you links.

 

[None]

Hi:

I had this exact same issue with Entourage on my laptop. I had a rule
in place that moved meeting invitations to another folder upon
delivery instead of leaving them in the inbox. Evidently Entourage
(and Outlook for that matter) didn't like this. There is a sniffer in
Entourage that will automatically scans for meeting invites in the
inbox. If the invite gets moved out of the inbox then this will break
the sniffer.

Once I disabled that particular rule I was able to properly accept or
decline meeting invites once again.

Check out <http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/
HA011276781033.aspx> especially the section labled "Don't move meeting
requests"

I hope this helps you guys out.

 

[Bandito]

@None - Thanks for the info but, unfortunately there are no rules running on either of these accounts. :-(

@Carol,

Finally, I had a chance to set up a new user and see what would happen. Nothing has changed. It's the same as before. Some invites work normally, some do not.

I also did a search for the missing calendar events and they did not show up. Once accepted, they simply go 'poof' and are gone.

Any ideas on what to try next?

 

[wtbates]

Just wondering if anyone has made any progress on this issue? I am
running Entourage 2008 SP1 and I am NOT having any of these issues.
However, there are people at my company that are.

WT