Mad Props!

I think the staff here at work (myself included) have been the victims of a mall-hallucination recently, around the "meeting request" feature in Outlook 2007.

In Exchange 2007 (and presumably in previous versions) you can set up your meeting rooms as a special kind of Room user in the address list. Then your users can use a special 'Rooms...' button on the 'Meeting Request' form to 'invite' that room to the meeting.

Since there's no human driving Outlook for a room, the rooms are set to automatically process meeting requests. If they're free at the time of the meeting, they accept. If they're already scheduled, they decline. Lovely.

The problem, though, is that this all happens too late. You schedule a meeting in the boardroom and invite twenty people. You forget to check everyone's schedule and hit "Send". Almost immediately a few efficient Outlook-users will accept your meeting. However, a few minutes later the room auto-processes the request and declines because it was already booked. Now you get an email from the room telling you it has declined, and you have to reschedule your meeting! You have to send updates to everybody! This is certainly less-than-ideal.

Here's where the mass-hallucination thing kicks in.

At least three people I've spoken to here at work have seen Outlook warn you that your meeting conflicts with an existing meeting for one of your invitees when you try to send the invitations. So before the room (and everyone else) even gets notified, you have a chance to fix the meeting time so that everyone's free. I've seen it do this too - but I can't for the life of me find where! I certainly can't make it happen again.

We've only been using Outlook for two weeks now, so it's not like this was months ago and we're all misremembering.

Has anyone out there seen Outlook behave like this? It makes sense for it to check invitees' schedules before it sends the invitations, right? Right???