Hi,  this is an old post.  we have e2k7 sp1.  did anyone get an answer
for this ?

Hi Guys/Girls,

We have stumbled across a very interesting problem with the use of
Outlook
2003 in an Exchange 2007 SP1environment. It seems to result in the Out
Of Office
assistant being out of sync between Outlook 2003 & OWA. We have approx
100
users and I am getting more and more complaints with out of office
replies
being old and out of date.

I have checked the 'Remote Domain' properties and made sure selected
is
'Allow external out-of-office messages, and out-of-office messages set
by
Outlook 2003 or earlier clients or sent by Exchange Server 2003 or
earlier
servers'. However this option still has not helped.

As a run through this is what happens:

1. Changed the out-of-office message within Outlook 2003 from older
OOF to
new date etc. (No rules are being used). Click OK.
2. Sent test e-mail to mail account and the OLD OOF is sent back to
the
sender.

The only way I seem to get OWA and Outlook 2003 back in sync is to
remove
the text within OWA from the 'External' & 'Internal' out of office
replies
and then go back within Outlook 2003 and set the OOF again.

I need to do the above process for each time an out of office is set.
As I
am sure you can appreciate it gets quite tiresome at times.

If anyone knows of an incompatibility issue or resolution for this I
would
really appreciate your views and opinions. I hear that SP1 for
Exchange 2007
is due out any time soon so does anyone know if this also has fixes
for the
out of office? I have reviewed the notes for SP1 and it does not
mention a
lot of OWA updates.

Any posts will be replied to extremely promptly as I would really like
to
get to the bottom of this issue.

Many thanks in advance!