Outlook 2003 Internet Free/Busy Tips

Background:
I am using Outlook 2003 and was wanting to retrieve Internet Free/Busy data
for a specific Outlook Contact of mine that he was publishing to a publicly
accessible web site, the details of which were held in the contact's
"Internet Free-Busy" field as a http://websitename.com/username.vfb style
URL at my end. I was attempting to include him in a new Meeting Request and
retrieve this data into the Meeting Request scheduling screen. At the
Contact's end, his Internet Free-Busy data was being published from Outlook
2003 via an FTP link.

Problem:
It just didn't work and no data was being retrieved into my meeting request.
The .vfb file was definitely being published and could browsed with IE. File
contents looked just fine. Spent hours reading available postings and all I
mainly found was other people with similar issues. A comment by Robert in
http://groups.google.co.nz/group/mic...7dee56daff0bf3
eventually sent me down the track of checking what was held in the Contact's
e-mail "Display As" field at my end.

Solution:
As bizarre as this sounds, it would appear that unless you have something in
the Contact's "First Name" as well as "Last Name" field and unless the
Contact's e-mail "Display As" field matches this EXACTLY, then the data will
not be retrieved back into your meeting request. It appears not to matter
what is displayed in brackets immediately afterwards in the "Display As"
field - provided the first section matches, it works every time. If you
leave the Contact's "First Name" blank - it fails to retrieve.

Info for Outlook 2000 users:
While attempting to diagnose the problem, I also experimented with a copy of
Outlook 2000 and kept getting a message of "An error occurred reading
Internet free/busy data. General failure". Found a tip that said you needed
to install the "MS Internet Publishing Wizard" to make this work under
Outlook 2000. Did that and subject to the "First Name"/"Last Name" detail
above, it appears to work there too. Because there is no visible "Display
As" field in Outlook 2000, those details don't seem to matter as much - but
as I'd found the solution in Outlook 2003 by then, I stopped experimenting.
I also published some Free/Busy data of my own, from Outlook 2000, so that
may have assisted. Didn't try Outlook XP/2002, but I'd hope the above will
work there too.

Trust the above info is enough to set other people on the right track,
because in my searching, there were certainly more questions than answers.

Although it didn't help in the above scenario, a good general MS article on
sharing Outlook info is at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/as...477571033.aspx

Regards
Allan