Hello,
We have identified a problem with Exchange web services appointment updates when sending updates to attendees. Whenever we send an appointment invitation or update to an attendee, Exchange seems to prepend a prefix to the body of the appointment. It looks something like this:
When:Saturday,September13,20146:00 PM-7:00 PM. UTC*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The problem we're facing is that this "down-level" text (the official name for this according to our research) has the wrong timezone. As you can see from the example, it give the time in UTC time zone, when the appointment was in fact created in MST.
We are using the Exchange managed API and using a network tracer have noticed that when the appointment is first created, the managed API will emit the full time zone header for the CreateItem request. On the create request, the down-level text will be displayed in the correct time zone. However, any update call will not be emitted with the time zone header. The time zone settting is definitely set on our Exchange Service instance. And we have experimented with all combinations of setting and/or not setting the Start and End Timezone properties of the appointment and the timezone property of the exchange service. Nothing we've tried allows for the down-level text to show up in the correct timezone.
1. It seems that if the Exchange service timezone context is emitted in the soap header, the down-level text will be displayed in the correct timezone. However, there doesn't seem to be any way to get the managed API to emit the timezone header on an appointment update. (We are using Managed API 2.0). Is this a bug in the Managed API?
2. The Exchange server should be using the timezone of the appointment itself to generate the down-level text timezone info. If the appointment Start timezone is set to a specific timezone, shouldn't the down-level text reflect that? Is this a bug in the Exchange Web services server side implementation? The Exchange server we tested on is Exchange 2010 SP3.
3. Is there an option, either client-side or server side to simply disable the down-level text prefix? It is confusing our users and is not necessary for our use cases.
I appreciate any help or insight any one can provide.
Richard