Randy Topken, a senior escalation engineer on Microsoft’s Outlook team, announced on the Exchange Team blog “You Had Me At EHLO” the release to the public of a tool he has been working on for several months. The Outlook Calendar Checking Tool, or CalCheck to its friends, was developed by Topken to help troubleshoot problems with calendars in Outlook and Exchange as well as to perform proactive checks.

The tool can work with all currently supported versions of Outlook from 2003 through 2010 (both 32 and 64 bit) and Exchange 2003 through 2010. Download the x86t version of CalCheck to work with 32bit systems, and the x64 version of CalCheck to diagnose 64 bit clients or servers.

CalCheck is a command line utility that will check individual calendars based on the selected Outlook profile, or can check all calendars on a server when run by a user with sufficient rights. Calendar-specific checks include:

• Permissions
• Delegates
• Free/Busy publishing
• Direct booking settings
• Total number of items

And for each item in the calendar, the tool checks for and logs:

• No Organizer email address
• No Sender email address
• No dispidRecurring property (causes an item to now show in the Day/Week/Month view)
• Time existence of the dispidApptStartWhole and dispidApptEndWhole properties
• No Subject for meetings that occur in the the future or for recurring meetings (a warning is logged)
• Message Class check (a warning is logged)
• dispidApptRecur (recurrence blob) is checked for time on overall start and end times, not for exceptions
• Check for Conflict items in the Calendar
• Check for duplicate items, based on certain MAPI properties
• Check if over 1250 recurring meetings (a warning is logged) and 1300 recurring meetings (an error is reported); 1300 is the limit
• Check if you are an attendee and you became the Organizer of a meeting
• Check meeting exception data to ensure it is the correct size

CalCheck supports several switches, detailed as follows:

Command Switches – and what they do

CalCheck [-P ] [-M ] [-S ] [-A] [-F] [-R] [-V] [-No] CalCheck -?

• -P Profile name (If this parameter is not specified, the tool prompts you for a profile)
• -M Mailbox DN (If this parameter is specified, only process the mailbox that is specified)
• -S Server name (Process the complete server unless a mailbox is specified)
• -A All calendar items are output to CALCHECK.CSV
• -F Create a CalCheck folder, and move flagged error items to the folder
• -R Put a Report message that contains the CalCheck.log file in the Inbox
• -V Verbose output to the Command Prompt window
• -No To omit a calendar item test
• The No parameter works with “org” to omit the “Attendee becomes Organizer” test and works with “dup” to omit duplicate item detection
• -? Print this message

CalCheck will generate a log file regarding all the checks it performs which you can view to learn more about items checked and any problems found. While extremely useful when troubleshooting Calendar issues, the tool is called CalCheck, not CalFix. This tool will help you quickly find items with problems, but it will not fix them. If you launch CalCheck with the –F switch it will move problem items to a CalCheck folder, but that is the extent of what it will do. You will still need to “fix” any items that CalCheck finds, frequently by deleting and recreating them. CalCheck also will only work on Exchange calendars. If you have other calendars in your Outlook client, CalCheck will not do anything with them.

Read more about this great new tool at the Exchange Team Blog, download CalCheck from the Microsoft Download Center, and access documentation, support, and user discussions on Codeplex at http://calcheck.codeplex.com/.

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