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Working elsewhere calendar status shows as free in scheduling assistant

Annemarie Balfour 21 Reputation points
2021-08-20T20:56:02.09+00:00

With work from home, and hybrid teams of in/out of office workers, we would like to use the "working elsewhere" status to indicate that someone is not available for in person meetings on their WFH days. Unfortunately, there's an issue:

Person A marks some time in their calendar as "working elsewhere". Person B wants to set up an in person meeting when everyone in their unit will be in the office, but in the Scheduling Assistant in Outlook, the time Person A booked simply shows as free (the appointment doesn't appear at all). Even if B has full mailbox permissions on A the "working elsewhere" appointment is missing in the scheduling assistant.

From my research, this situation only happens when person A and B are on different mailbox servers (e.g. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/5543fe89-ec9f-4200-8b2f-6bd3b8a114ee/appointments-with-option-working-elsewhere-not-visible-in-scheduling-assistant?forum=exchangesvrclients, or https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/9036ab88-dabc-446a-806a-d52e08bad386/working-elsewhere-status-not-showing-up-thru-scheduling-assistant?forum=exchangesvrclients). Unfortunately, with our large Exchange environment, this is very likely to be the case for the majority of person A and B combinations.

Exchange 2013, Outlook 2016 is our environment.

The only references I can find to this problem are several years old and many CUs out of date.

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For business
Exchange | Exchange Server | Management
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  1. Yuki Sun-MSFT 41,376 Reputation points Moderator
    2021-08-23T07:31:12.457+00:00

    Hi @Annemarie Balfour ,

    Based on your description, I tested in my Exchange 2013 (CU23) lab and can reproduce this issue. But there's no issue in Exchange 2016 or Exchange 2019, that is, the Working Elsewhere status can show properly in Scheduling Assistant.

    Also found the thread below which discusses a similar and according to the information shared there by Allen, this has been confirmed as a known issue in Exchange 2013.
    Appointments with option Working Elsewhere not visible for all users
    "I reproduce this issue in my lab, and I also double confirm that it's a known issue in Exchange 2013."

    Given current situation that the issue still persists in the latest CU23 for Exchange 2013, I personally would like to recommend encouraging the users to choose other status like "tentative" as a workaround.

    An alternative I can think of is to configure MailTips for users who are working from home. For example, we can run the command below to create a mailtip for user31: 

    Set-Mailbox user31 -MailTip "User31 is Working From Home."

    Then when user31 is added as a recipient in either a message or a meeting event, the sender will see the mailtip and thus be informed that user31 is currently WFH:
    125370-1.png

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    1 person found this answer helpful.

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