The OOOAA (Out of Office Administrators Assistant) has been out in the field a few days now – see:  (http://telnetport25.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/one-more-time-the-out-of-office-admin-tool-for-exchange-2007/) for the release.

Since its release I have received some great support feedback , the most relevant of which I would like to share with you in this post.

• SQL 2005 Servers Configured to accept “Trusted Connections”

  As per the documentation, the tool requires a SQL 2005 Database server – which can either be SQL Express or a dedicated instance on the client network. Some SQL 2005 servers are configured to accept Secure or Trusted connections only – this can cause the OOOAA tool to fail when updating the database and stop the PS-Processor.ps1 script from connecting to the database.

  The fix for this requires the following modifications to be made to the ODBC.inc file and the PS-Processor script:

  ODBC.inc

  Open the ODBC.inc file (located in the root off the OOO installation directory) using a text editor such as Notepad and change the DSN to look like the following:

  cn=”Provider=SQLOLEDB;” & “Data Source=localhost;” & “Initial Catalog=ooo;Trusted_Connection=Yes;” & “Network=DBMSSOCN;” & “User Id=ooosa;” & “Password=bg194022!”
  
  PS-Processor.ps1
  
  Open the PS-Processor.ps1 script file (this is located in the PS-Processor directory in the root of the OOO installation) using a text editor such as Notepad.

  Locate and edit the following lines:
  
  $objConnectionPWD.Open(“Provider=SQLOLEDB;Data Source=127.0.0.1;Initial Catalog=ooo;Trusted_Connection=Yes;Network=DBMSSOCN;User Id=ooosa;Password=bg194022!”)

  $objConnection.Open(“Provider=SQLOLEDB;Data Source=127.0.0.1;Initial Catalog=ooo;Trusted_Connection=Yes;Network=DBMSSOCN;User Id=ooosa;Password=bg194022!”)
  

• Minor Error in the syntax in the Execute.bat file

  The Execute.bat file is located in the PS-Processor directory located off the root of the OOO installation – using Notepad open the Execute.bat file delete all of the contents within it and replace them with the following:

  powershell.exe -PSConsoleFile “C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin\exshell.psc1″ -command “. ‘\OOO\PS-Processor\OOO-PSProcessor.ps1′”

  The existing download of the program has been modified to reflect these changes.

• Issues with the EWSUtil assembly

  One person has reported problems with the EWSUtil assembly generating errors during execution and not setting the OOO message on the mailbox – even though their CAS server has passed all tests required in the documentation.

  One fix that I have found for this is to open the PS-Processor.ps1 file (using Notepad) and change the following line:

  $oofutil.setoof($Account,”Enabled”,$InternalMessage,$ExternalMessage,$UserName,
  $Password,$NETBIOS,”https://”+$FQDN+”/EWS/Exchange.asmx”)

  To read:
  
  $oofutil.setoof($Account,”Enabled”,$InternalMessage,$ExternalMessage)
  

• Errata in the Documentation

  Some small errors in the documentation for the OOOAA have been corrected – the most important of which is the section which details the configuration of the ODBC.inc file – in the documentation this is referred to as the ODBC.ini file this has been changed to INC file.

I have also noticed that a number of people have been downloading the documentation (which is great) however the same connections are then downloading the previous version of the tool (the OOO.zip) – it is important to note the documentation is designed for the OOO-V2.exe download.

I would like to thank all of those people whom have provided feedback thus far – please continue to update me, as I can then build in the fixes and your suggestions.