I discovered a bug with the R2 Dial-in conferencing… the good news is that it’s being fixed by MS as we speak (I wasn’t the only one to discover the bug!). There is a hotfix for the LiveMeeting client now. UPDATE: and now, thanks to a comment from Joel, I have the link to the Outlook plug-in hotfix as well. In fact, I believe that the hotfix for the Outlook plug-in is in fact the most important of the two.
Anyway, here are the details:
When you cancel a calendar appointment that was a conference call using your personal conference ID, OCS "automatically" voids your personal conference ID and creates a new one for you – without telling you. This means that any appointments that you have with the "old" ID are most likely void.
To see it in action follow along with the steps below. Note: if you do this, you will reset your conf ID, so my advice is to just trust me! J
- Open Outlook
- Click the "Schedule a Conference Call" icon
- Make sure "invite anyone" is selected in permissions
- Make sure in "audio" you have "use my assigned conference ID for each conference"
- Notice my conf ID is 42346. Send it / save the appt
- Then open the meeting in your calendar and click "cancel meeting" and "send cancellation"..,
- Schedule a new conf call w/ "invite anyone":
- My conference ID is automagically reset to 64568.
And the worst part is: my old one is gone and won’t work for future use! Doh – this hurts when you’ve scheduled recurring meetings with your conference ID.
Once you’ve applied the hotfixes, I can confirm that the above behavior is corrected. Here’s an abbreviated FAQ I put together for users to read along with the hotfixes.
FAQ
Q: What exactly is the bug?
A: When you cancel a calendar appointment that was a conference call using your personal conference ID, OCS "automatically" voids your personal conference ID and creates a new one for you – without telling you. This means that any appointments that you have with the "old" ID are most likely void.
Q: I’ve never cancelled any conferences. Did my conference ID change on me?
A: Probably not, however see the question below to be sure. You still need to install the updates, though, to avoid future mayhem.
Q: How do you *know* if you have a bad/void Conference ID as a result of the bug?
A: There are two ways to tell.
1) you can dial into the bridge and test your ID… if it fails, you know you’ve been bitten by the bug.
2) you can look up your assigned conf ID by clicking on this link. Now look at one of your existing conference (not LiveMeeting) requests in Outlook. If the two conference IDs don’t match, then you’ve been bitten by the bug.
Q: Once I’ve applied the updates, how do I find any future or recurring appointments that have my old, invalid Conference ID?
A: Search your calendar via outlook. If your previous ID was 12345, a calendar search will turn up all those meetings.
Q: How do I fix those meetings that have the bad ID?
A: Create a new conference in Outlook. Copy the entire body of the new request, including the links to "Join Using Communicator and all the way down to the bottom of the message. Now open up your old, defective, conference appointments. Paste all of the OCS and Dial-in related information in over the old, outdated info. Now send the updated meeting out to all attendees of the conference. Note: Don’t just update the Conference ID – you’ll want to replace all the info in the body because it includes the link to your new conference ID.
Hope this helps some of you – it was killing me!
