Thursday, May 15, 2014

"The operation failed. Cannot directly book a resource for this meeting." Outlook 2007, Exchange 2007

We recently started having some frustrating issues with resource mailboxes on our Exchange server. The issue didn't seem to affect every user, and the exact error message depended on a number of different factors. The most common is the one listed in the title: "The operation failed. Cannot directly book a resource for this meeting.", but we also saw:

'You marked " resource name " as a resource. You cannot schedule a meeting with " resource name " because you do not have the appropriate permissions for that account. Either enter the name as a required or optional attendee or talk to your administrator about giving you permission to schedule " resource name " . '

We tried SO MANY suggestions on this issue before hitting on the magic method in this thread The following steps cleared up this error for all users in all configurations:

  1. Make sure you have full access permissions on the calendar (done in EMC)
  2. Create an Outlook profile from the Mail control panel for the resource account
  3. Open Outlook with the resource profile
  4. Go to Tools > Options > Calendar Options > Resource Scheduling
  5. Uncheck all options!

It seems paradoxical that un-checking these options would work. Stranger still is that the calendars continue to automatically process requests, etc. after un-checking these options. Oh well, another mystery solved!

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Install Dell Wireless 1506 without Unified Wireless Application

I just got a batch of Dell Latitude E7440's on my desk and found, much to my surprise and annoyance, that they came bundled with a wifi management application called Unified Wireless Application. Uninstalling this useless drek also unhelpfully uninstalled the driver for the wifi card! The situation is described in more detail here.

I was able to get the drivers from this package and get them installed by doing the following:
  1. Download file Network_Driver_8G8D5_WN_10.0.0.286_A02.exe from Dell
  2. Run this executable and choose Extract to dump contents to C:\temp\
  3. After uninstalling the Useless Wireless Application I opened the Device Manager and found the device in question
  4. Choose to Update Driver, then point the device manager at C:\temp\

This seems like the kind of hack that shouldn't be necessary on a brand new system, but there you have it - wifi without the annoyance.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Website Project - www.shitredditbuys.com

I'd like to take a moment to introduce my new web project: Shit Reddit Buys. This is the first iteration in a project I'm part of to automatically generate content for a website. You can also see a live feed on Reddit itself: /r/ShitRedditBuys. We're currently in the process of expanding our algorithms to focus specifically on music and books and will launch those in the near future. If you've ever wondered what users on Reddit are buying - wonder no more!