Availability service

The Availability service retrieves free/busy information directly from the target mailbox for users on Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007 and can be configured to retrieve free/busy information for users on earlier versions of Exchange. For topologies that have Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 mailboxes in which all clients are running Outlook 2007, the Availability service is used to retrieve free/busy information.

Note:
If you have Outlook 2007 clients running on Exchange Server 2003 mailboxes, Outlook 2007 will use public folders to retrieve free/busy information.

Outlook 2007 uses the Exchange Server 2010 Autodiscover service to obtain the URL of the Availability service. For more information about the Autodiscover service, see Managing the Autodiscover Service.
The Availability service is part of the Exchange 2010 programming interface. It is available as a public Web service to allow developers to write third-party tools for integration purposes.
You can use the Exchange Management Shell to configure the Availability service. You can't use the Exchange Management Console to configure the Availability service.
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You must create a test account before you can diagnose Availability service issues using the Test-OutlookWebServices cmdlet. To create the test mailbox, log on to the Exchange Server 2007 or Exchange 2010 Mailbox server

This example tests access to the Availability service for user User1@Contoso.com.

 

Test-OutlookWebServices -Identity: User1@Contoso.com
This example tests user access to the Availability service on the Client Access server ClientAccessServer01.

 

Test-OutlookWebServices -ClientAccessServer ClientAccessServer01

This example tests Availability service connectivity between users in two different Active Directory sites.






 

Test-OutlookWebServices -Identity User1@Site1.Contoso.com -TargetAddress User2@Site2.Fabrikam.com

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This example configures the Availability service for load balancing for a domain named Contoso.com.

 

Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -Identity "EWS*" -ExternalUrl "Https:// mail.contoso.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx" -InternalUrl "Https:// mail.contoso.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx"

Note:
If you have a set of load balanced Client Access servers, you don't have to specify the name of each server when you run this command. You only need to use the name of one of the servers in the set of load balanced servers.

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This example configures the Availability service to retrieve per-user free/busy information on a Client Access server in the target forest.

 

Get-ClientAccessServer | Add-ADPermission -Accessrights Extendedright -Extendedrights "ms-Exch-
EPI-Token-Serialization"  -User "<Remote Forest Domain>\Client Access servers"

This example defines the free/busy access method that the Availability service uses on the local Client Access server in the source forest. The local Client Access server is configured to access free/busy information from the forest ContosoForest.com on a per-user basis. This example uses the service account to retrieve free/busy information.

 

Add-AvailabilityAddressSpace -Forestname ContosoForest.com -AccessMethod PerUserFB -UseServiceAccount:$true

To configure bidirectional cross-forest availability, repeat these steps in the target forest.

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This example configures trusted cross-forest availability with a service account.

 

Get-ClientAccessServer | Add-ADPermission -Accessrights Extendedright -Extendedright "ms-Exch-EPI-Token-Serialization"  -User "<Remote Forest Domain>\Exchange servers"