Office 365 OWA Calendar Issues

[JRowley]

So having set up a Hybrid Exchange along with Office 365 and having everything working well on our various test accounts, we've just started to encounter a problem that didn't exist 2 weeks ago.

 

Essentially we have a series of room calendars (both On Premises and one migrated to Exchange Online) which up until recently (as of some time last week) were accessible in Outlook 2010/2013, On Premises OWA and O365 OWA, every client could interact with every calendar. Well now On Premises OWA cannot open the calendar hosted on Exchange Online, and O365 OWA cannot open any calendars hosted On Premises. What makes this issue more frustrating to deal with is that the Outlook clients are perfectly fine, be that On Site or Off Site! Not only that the Exchange Connectivity Tester reports that everything is hooked up perfectly for Free/Busy information.

 

Now the obvious question for us is what have we changed, and as far as we know we haven't changed anything that would effect specifically OWA when accessing calendars. So we are at a bit of a loss, does anyone have any suggestions before we put a support request in? We are still testing and configuring O365 so this isn't critical as such.

[JRowley]

Just to update this, the problem still exists and has been escalated up a level from the normal service team. This new team believe that this is by design, though this was working previously and there are KBs that confirm that you should be able to see Free/Busy information through cross-forest federations.

 

From our testing the data is shared as you can access it through the scheduling assistant, however it isn't being displayed (and throws the error I spoke of) in the regular calendar view, I find it extremely hard to believe that this is now by design.

 

Does anyone have something similar working? Where you can view a room calendar between an O365 hosted mailbox and an On-Premises mailbox (in either direction)?

Edited February 13, 2015 by JRowley

[Arrak]

We have similar problem: O365 owa can't open any OnPrem calendars but scheduling assistant shows free/busy and OnPrem OWA can't open any O365 calendars. Everything works just fine when tried with Outlook.

We have opened a premium support ticket but haven't got any answer yet considering this matter.

[JRowley]

It's stated clearly here that it is supported, I fail to see how or why they would remove the functionality personally - https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2807149?wa=wsignin1.0

 

Obviously we don't expect the permissions to work but we should be able to see Free/Busy information, I'll keep you posted on our ticket but it's looking like they will just mark it as resolved because they believe it to be by design.

 

Edit: Has it been working for you in the past?

Edited February 17, 2015 by JRowley

[Arrak]

Yes it has. Users could open each other calendar (crosspremises) without any problems since we had hybrid set up. Until last week friday everything worked fine and then suddenly we started get reports from users that they can't access calendars if they are not specifically shared for them.

[JRowley]

Yes it has. Users could open each other calendar (crosspremises) without any problems since we had hybrid set up. Until last week friday everything worked fine and then suddenly we started get reports from users that they can't access calendars if they are not specifically shared for them.

 

Hmm, sounds to me like they are rolling out a change on the backend which has broken the functionality as ours stopped working earlier than yours.

[Arrak]

On a interesting side note, we did network tracing with browsers (IE/FF) and noticed that https://outlook.office365.com/owa/auth/errorfe.aspx is returning httpCode=500 (which is InternalServerError) when you try to open crosspremises calendars.

We haven't heard from MS anything yet...

[JRowley]

Just got off the phone.

 

They believe it to be by design because while you can view Free/Busy information through the scheduling assistant (which uses the default permission), in order to add and view a calendar it requires you to have different permissions (which I can't find). These permissions apparently aren't support cross-forest even if the default permission would allow you to view the free/busy information. He also had no explanation as to why it worked previously or why it still works in Outlook, he also couldn't provide an explanation for why they had made the decision to not support this.

 

I've requested more information as I find that to be a huge oversight which isn't documented anywhere, which the support engineer confirmed to be the case, he also couldn't find any information on it. I'm not really satisfied with this frankly.

Edited February 18, 2015 by JRowley

[Arrak]

In OrganizationRelationship you can set the default level from Free/Busy to LimitedDetails. ( for example we have FreeBusyAccessLevel : LimitedDetails). Also in ECP, you can configure several different levels of access to calendar for cross-forest (or external) calendar access). But if we get same answer you got, it is kind of a deal-breaker for us because we were told by MS consultant it is supposed to be possible to open cross-forest calendars with Free/busy or with LimitedDetails. I would understand if the calendar would open with Free/Busy status shown only, but currently you can't open the calendar at all anymore.

 

Most of our users are Outlook users so the situation is not worst possible. I fear the OWA change is just the beginning and Outlook stops working too.

 

We still haven't heard anything from the support.

[JRowley]

In OrganizationRelationship you can set the default level from Free/Busy to LimitedDetails. ( for example we have FreeBusyAccessLevel : LimitedDetails). Also in ECP, you can configure several different levels of access to calendar for cross-forest (or external) calendar access). But if we get same answer you got, it is kind of a deal-breaker for us because we were told by MS consultant it is supposed to be possible to open cross-forest calendars with Free/busy or with LimitedDetails. I would understand if the calendar would open with Free/Busy status shown only, but currently you can't open the calendar at all anymore.

 

Most of our users are Outlook users so the situation is not worst possible. I fear the OWA change is just the beginning and Outlook stops working too.

 

We still haven't heard anything from the support.

 

Our Access Level is set to allow Free/Busy access with time, plus subject and Location. So pretty similar I think.

[JRowley]

Another phone call from our contact, he stated that he could not find any documentation to support it being by design as the documentation he found simply states you are unable to edit, not open the calendars in this configuration. So as a result we did some powershell transcripts of some of our policies on both our on-premises server and O365, and took some network traces with IE11's dev tools and fiddler (both reproduced the error 500 regarding the calendar details) he is now escalating it internally to the Operations team so that he can remain our contact.

 

So looks like we are getting somewhere, though he mentioned that this may take some time to resolve as they will need to investigate the issue and then action the engineers to develop a fix if one is required. Also we are still running RU 3 on our on-premises server, but he has tested it on servers up to and including RU 8 and it is present in all of them so he believes that if there is a problem then Exchange Online also carries it.

[Arrak]

Good to hear at least something is happening on your end.

[Arrak]

Our support is saying that it is "by design" and they are on the verge of closing the ticket. We just had it "forcefully" escalated by our Premier-contact.

[JRowley]

Good news, had another call from out support contact, the operations team have confirmed the issue, have developed a fix and deployed it to production for Exchange Online. There isn't a need to do anything on our end, so it's just a case of waiting for the fix to propagate through to our organisation.

 

So yours should also be fixed shortly, our contact said that these fixes can take up to 8 weeks, though he expects it to be significantly less time. I don't know how you want to proceed with your request to be honest, probably best to follow it to the end I suppose.

[JRowley]

The fix has already started to take effect as the problem has been resolved for my account, but not for my colleagues!

[Arrak]

The fix has already started to take effect as the problem has been resolved for my account, but not for my colleagues!

 

Looks like it. Problem is resolved for me and several other accounts but majority of our organization still seem to be suffering from the problem. I also noticed we still can't open any Exchange Online calendars from On-Premises OWA.

Edited March 1, 2015 by Arrak

[Arrak]

Looks like it. Problem is resolved for me and several other accounts but majority of our organization still seem to be suffering from the problem. I also noticed we still can't open any Exchange Online calendars from On-Premises OWA.

 

We noticed that some On-Premises users can open calendars from Exchange Online but this doesn't seem to correlate to the Exchange Online users who can open from calendars from On-Premises.

[JRowley]

We noticed that some On-Premises users can open calendars from Exchange Online but this doesn't seem to correlate to the Exchange Online users who can open from calendars from On-Premises.

 

I would assume the same issue that effects Exchange Online may also be in the latest Roll Up, so presumably they will need to release a patch for on premises if that is the case, it would be worth mentioning to your service rep to see if they can confirm that.