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Exchange 2007 Event 8207 MSExchangeFBPublish Finally Fixed
Friday, 24 October 2008
4 CommentsA new regular occurrence in our Exchange Server 2007 Event Log has been Event 8207 for source MSExchangeFBPublish and it has taken quite some time to figure out how to fix it:
Error updating public folder with free/busy information on virtual machine ServerName. The error number is 0×80004005.
The first port of call was the Microsoft support site which led to this article Event 8207 is logged after you remount the public information store but that didn’t yield any results in particular. Looking through the services it seems that Exchange System Attendant is linked with publishing this information but restarting it yielded no results, neither did dismounting and remounting the Public Folders.
There are no other Exchange Servers in operation in the company although at some point in the past we did migrate from Exchange Server 2000. An interesting peculiarity is that the Free Busy information works fine on Outlook 2007 and it is only Outlook 2003 that is reporting the problem "No free/busy information could be retrieved" – unfortunately most of our users are still using Outlook 2003.
The next port of call was to check the Public Folder list using the Exchange Server 2007 Console (from the extremely useful information from Aaron at Exchange Server 2007 and Public Folder Replicas), in particular the command:
Get-PublicFolder -server exchsvr "\non_ipm_subtree\SCHEDULE+ FREE BUSY" -recurse | Format-List
Which indicated no replicas were being stored for this folder, so I ran the recommended commands (for some reason the hyphen was missing from the Identity and Replicas parameters on Aarons post which took a bit of figuring out)
Set-PublicFolder -Identity "\NON_IPM_SUBTREE\SCHEDULE+ FREE BUSY\EX:/o=company/ou=First Administrative Group" Replicas "server\Public Folder Database"
Set-PublicFolder -Identity "\NON_IPM_SUBTREE\SCHEDULE+ FREE BUSY\EX:/o=company/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)" -Replicas "server\Public Folder Database"
After running these commands the Replicas were now set as the intended Public Folder Database.
I restarted the System Attendant just to be sure and checking the event logs yielded this rather nice surprise
Event 8290 Source: MSExchangeFBPublish
The query sessions have been restored. The virtual machine is server.
In testing the scenario under Outlook 2003 we did find that some users needed to go into Tools->Options->Preferences->Calendar Options->Free/Busy Options and simply click OK for their settings to take effect – for other users it was a case of running Outlook.exe /cleanfreebusy
One particular user only started transmitting Free/Busy data once they had actually placed a calendar item (they had not previously used the calendaring function which may explain it).
Jason Slater is an independent technologist and blogger.
Jason, I stumbled across your excellent article trying to solve a very similiar problem of my own. I have not, to date, been successful in addressing this event. Usually the cmdlet returns an error ( I also went to Aaron’s post first) at the FREE BUSY portion of the command. I am using the Exchange Shell to do this. If I post my version of the 2 cmdlets would you be willing to verify my syntax? Thanks in advance.
P.S. This was an SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration using the answer file. Everything else went real smooth except for the Public Folders which now have their own Storage Group.
I have been unable to resolve the Event Id 8207. I spoke with Microsoft yesterday and we created a new Public Folder to use since it appeared the Public Folders did not migrate properly through teh answer file during the migration process. Luckily the users and the store are not affected, the server just generates 22 errors per day with the FREE BUSY event. My stores are mounted and this appears to be the only event left over from the migration. Perhaps someone out there knows how to address through ASDI Edit.
Thanks for this info, it worked a treat!
I started to get 8207 error on all of my Exchange 2007 servers roughly 3 weeks after transitioning my final site to Exchange 2007. Of all of the different fixes I’ve seen and tried this is the only one that has worked. In my case though i had to set a replica on every server in Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)…something that MS doesn’t recommend. After talking to MS premier support they agreed that in my instance it was needed after all.
Jason,
I just want to thank you for your article I had the exact same scenario and had been searching for a solution when i came here. This is the last problem that i had to iron out after my conversion. Again thank you worked like a charm.