Overview of the 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.
noteNote:
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.
Availability Service Process Flow

The following figure illustrates the process flow for the Availability service.
Availabililty Service Process Flow

Return to top
Improvements Over Exchange 2003 Free/Busy

The following table lists the improvements to free/busy functionality that Exchange
2010 and Exchange 2007 provide over Exchange 2003.
Free/busy improvements
Free/busy component Outlook 2003 running on Exchange 2003 Outlook
2007 running on Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Up-to-date information

There was no guarantee that free/busy information was up-to-date. There were
multiple factors that caused free/busy information to be outdated:

By default, Outlook only updated free/busy information every 45 minutes. Also,

because of bandwidth and scalability issues, you could not decrease this interval.

There were latencies that resulted from public folder replication.

In cross-forest scenarios, there were delays when you used the Microsoft
Exchange Inter-Organization Replication tool to replicate free/busy information
across forests.

Free/busy information is guaranteed to be up to date within a small time period (60

seconds) on all the data retrieved.

Granularity

The four meeting states (Free, Tentative, Busy, and Out-Of-Office) were available in
one stream. To retrieve appointment details, additional MAPI calls were required.

By default, free/busy information displays the start and end times for individual
appointments. Additional calendar properties (such as Subject and Location) will be
available through the Availability service.
Security

For any authenticated user, all free/busy data was available in a public folder. This
meant that any authenticated user could delete, modify, or publish another user's
free/busy information.

Free/busy information provides increased security, similar to general calendar

sharing. In compliance with your company's policy, you can specify how much
free/busy information to share with a specific user. Because the Availability service
reads directly from a user's mailbox, a user cannot modify or publish another user's
free/busy information.

Publishing frequency

Outlook 2003 has a 45-minute default publishing interval.

No publishing is required in an Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2007 organization.

Return to top
Information About Away Status

The Availability service also provides access to automatic-reply messages that users
send when they are out of the office or away for an extended period of time.

Information workers use the Automatic Replies feature (formerly known as Out of
Office) in Outlook and Outlook Web App to alert others when they're unavailable to
respond to e-mail messages. This functionality makes it easier to set and manage
automatic-reply messages for both information workers and administrators.
For more information, see Managing Automatic Replies.
Performance

You can use the performance counters listed under MSExchange Availability Service
in the Performance Monitor tool to automatically collect performance data about the
Availability service from local or remote computers that are running Exchange 2010.

Return to top
Distribution Group Handling

In Exchange 2010, distribution group expansion is processed on the Exchange 2010

server instead of on the Outlook client. In Exchange 2007, distribution group
expansion is processed on the Exchange 2007 server. The primary benefit of moving
distribution group expansion to Exchange 2010 is to provide consistent behavior for
any Availability service consumer. In Exchange 2003 and earlier versions of
Exchange, if the number of users in a distribution group was too large, the free/busy
data for the distribution group members would not display when the group was
expanded.

In Exchange 2010, the following improvements have been made to the handling of
distribution groups:

The Availability service expands a distribution group up to only two-levels deep,

regardless of the total number of distribution group members.

A distribution group's free/busy data can expand up to a maximum of one

hundred members.

Availability Service API

The Availability service is part of the Exchange 2010 programming interface. It's
available as a Web service to let developers write third-party tools for integration
purposes.
Availability Service Network Load Balancing
Using Network Load Balancing (NLB) on your Client Access servers that are running
the Availability service can improve performance and reliability for your users who
rely on free/busy information. Outlook 2007 discovers the Availability service URL
using the Autodiscover service. To use network load balancing with the Availability
service, you must make changes to your configuration.

The internal URL is used from the intranet, and the external URL is used from the
Internet. If you want to use the same URL for both internal and external traffic,
make sure that DNS is correctly configured to route internal traffic directly to the
internal URL. Also, make sure that the URL can be accessed both internally and
externally. For the Autodiscover and Availability services to work, DNS must be
configured so that mail.<domain name>.com and autodiscover.mail.<domain
name>.com point to the Network Load Balancing (NLB) array of Client Access
servers, where <domain name> is the name of your domain.
noteNote:
For more information, see Network Load Balancing Technical Reference and Network
Load Balancing Clusters. You can also search for third-party load-balancing software
Web sites.

For information, see Configure the Availability Service for Network Load Balanced
Computers.

Return to top
Methods Used to Retrieve Free/Busy Information

The following table lists the different methods used to retrieve free/busy information
in different single-forest topologies.

Client Mailbox retrieving free/busy information is running Target mailbox is running

Free/busy retrieval method

Outlook 2007

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

The Availability service reads free/busy information from the target mailbox.

Outlook 2007

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Exchange 2003

The Availability service makes HTTP connections to the /public virtual directory of
the Exchange 2003 mailbox.

Outlook 2003

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Free/busy information is published in local public folders.

Outlook 2003
Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Exchange 2003

Free/busy information is published in local public folders.

Outlook Web App

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Outlook Web App in Exchange 2010 or Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2007 calls
the Availability service API, which reads the free/busy information from the target
mailbox.

Outlook Web App

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Exchange 2003
Outlook Web App in Exchange 2010 or Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2007 calls
the Availability service API, which makes an HTTP connection to the /public virtual
directory of the Exchange 2003 mailbox.

Any

Exchange 2003

Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007

Free/busy information is published in local public folders.

Return to top