A meeting has been cancelled instead of rescheduled – coexistence between Lotus Notes 6.5 and Microsoft Outlook 2010

The environment:

Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1
Microsoft Outlook 2010
Lotus Domino 7
Lotus Notes 6.5
Quest Notes Migrator for Exchange 4.4
Quest Coexistence Manager for Notes 3.0.0.69

Description of the issue:

Several users have been successfully migrated from Domino/Notes to Exchange/Outlook using QNME and everything works well. Coexistence between Notes and Outlook clients is facilitated by QCMN.

If a user who was migrated from Notes to Outlook reschedules a recurring meeting that was originally created in Notes, an update is sent to both Outlook and Notes clients. Outlook processes such updates properly, but Notes doesn’t. So, instead of an update, QCMN forwards a meeting cancellation to Notes users asking them to manually update their calendars.

The message that QCMN inserts into the meeting update:

Meeting Cancelled: %sender_name% has cancelled the meeting. Your calendar will be updated to reflect this change.

The recurring meeting '$MeetingSummary$' organized by $Organizer$ has been removed from your calendar because it was changed by a user with different calendar software. (Incompatibilities between Notes and Exchange prevent automatic calendar updates in these circumstances.)

Please add the new (changed/replacement) meeting to your calendar manually:

Findings:

If a meeting update was sent by an Outlook client whose mailbox wasn’t migrated from Notes, but originally created in MS Exchange, QCMN and Notes process the update without any issues.

If a meeting update was sent by an Outlook user whose mailbox was migrated from Notes, but the meeting was originally created in Outlook, again QCMN and Notes process the update properly.

Workaround:

A long term solution to this issue is to recreate the meeting in Outlook and send a new invitation to both Outlook and Notes users. Once Notes users accept the new invitation and record it in their calendars, all future updates of the meeting will be processed properly.

Unfortunately, QCMN does not inform the sender of the meeting update about the issue, but only the recipients. However, it’s possible to change the message generated by QCMN and ask the recipient(s) to contact the sender and ask her to recreate the meeting and resend invitations.

Go to QCMN and navigate to Notifications Messages, in the message list find a message titled:

“Notes6RescheduledSeriesDescription”

The message description says:

Message prepended to the description of an Exchange-originating, Domino 6.5.x-bound appointment series rescheduling whose original appointments have been removed from the calendar and whose rescheduled ones must be manually added.

Add additional information to the bottom of the existing message in the plain text message field, something like:

Optionally, you may ask the person who scheduled the meeting to recreate the meeting in Microsoft Outlook and resend an invitation. Once the meeting has been recreated in Microsoft Outlook and an invitation sent and accepted, Notes will process all future changes without any issues.