Unable to busy search from Exchange to GroupWise thru GroupWise 7 Exchange gateway

  • 7000543
  • 02-Jun-2008
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell GroupWise 7 Service Pack 3
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2
Novell GroupWise Gateway - 7.x Gateway for MS Exchange
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition Service Pack 2

Situation

Unable to busy search from Exchange 2003 to GroupWise 7. No busy search data ever comes back to the Microsoft Outlook 2003 client when scheduling an "Appointment Request" for GroupWise users. GroupWise users can busy search Exchange users with no problem.

Resolution

It was determined that the problem occured as of a result of having the GroupWise user objects in Microsoft active directory contain an attribute called "legacyExchangeDN" that does not match the same attribute for the Novell GroupWise 7 Gateway connector object. This attribute is from Microsoft .

For example :

1. Let's say that the user "Bob Perez" was synchronized from GroupWise to active directory and has a "legacyExchangeDN attribute of :

/o=First Organization/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=Bob Perez

Note: This attribute for USERS and other objects in active directory can be seen using a Microsoft utility called "adsiedit.msc", installed from the Support Tools from a Windows 2003 CD.

Note: Also be aware that the use of this utility on a production Exchange system can cause potential problems unless you are experienced in it's use.
PLEASE TEST THIS OUT IN A TEST EXCHANGE SYSTEM FIRST.

2. Let's say that the Novell GroupWise Exchange gateway connector object ( called "Exchange" ) has a "legacyExchangeDN" of :

/o=First Organization/ou=Utah Administrative Group/cn=configuration/CN=Connections/CN=Exchange

3. In this example you will notice that the "Administrative Group" name (First Administrative Group) of the legacyExchangeDN for the USER is different than the "Administrative Group" name for the GroupWise Exchange connector object (Utah Administrative Group). This difference is one thing that can cause this busy search problem. They should be the same. The Exchange administrative user will have to change the "Administrative Group" for all GroupWise users to match the administrative group of the Exchange connector object. If there are more than a few users that need to have their legacyExchangeDN attribute modified, that can be done with an LDAP script to modify this attribute for the active directory user objects that need this.

4. NOTE: Modifying the legacyExchangeDN to fix the busy search issue above can cause an Exchange email reply problem so to avoid that potential issue, you must modify another active directory attribute called "ProxyAddresses"

You can just copy the existing X400 address of the GroupWise user, under this attribute to create an X500 address, but you MUST change all semi-colon characters to a forward slash :

X400:c=us;a= ;p=First Organizati;o=Exchange;s=All-Sales;

X500:/o=First Organization/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=All-Sales

NOTE: "p=First Organizati" listed above in the X.400 example is NOT a mistake the "on" is truncated for whatever reason.