We are trying to setup the Outlook Free/Busy feature for our
workplace. We have a combination of Outlook XP and Outlook 2003
software, and have read each of the respective KB articles on how to
set up Free/Busy with this software. All workstations are Windows XP
with the latest updates installed. We do not have an Exchange server.

Publishing our free busy information works perfectly. We have two
options, a normal fileserver (using UNC paths, windows 2000) and a
WebDAV server (Apache 2.0), and both can be published to with no
problems. We know it works fine because I can actually watch the vfb
files appear on the servers just as I submit the information from my
local copy of Outlook. Both servers are on the same subnet as the
workstations; there is no firewall or otherwise between machines (they
are for internal use only, they are not connected to outside
networks).

Our company email addresses are . We
name our vfb files firstname.lastname.vfb so that we can use the
%NAME% macro in the search feature.

The problem, however, is with the retrieval of the information. When
we start a 'New Meeting Request' on the calendar and click on the
Scheduling tab, everything seems to be in order. However, when we
enter names into the box, Outlook always says that information cannot
be retrieved. Outlook XP and 2003 basically say the same thing. 2003
adds the words "general failure". For the name, we tried entering all
sorts of variations: firstname, lastname, firstname.lastname,
firstname lastname, ... none seem to
work.

The weird part about this is that Outlook doesn't seem to be doing
anything at all when it is supposed to be looking up this information.
Using FileMon (from Sysinternals), there is no local file activity.
Using ethereal, we don't see any outgoing network activity from the
workstation. Looking at server access logs on both the file server
(windows 2000 event log, with auditing) and our Apache WebDAV server
(access_log and error_log), we don't see any attempt whatsoever. We
thought the XP firewall might be interfering, however neither adding
outlook.exe or disabling the firewall altogether seemed to help. Plus,
since we can publish the information just fine, we really don't think
it's a network problem.

Permissions do not seem to be a problem either. For our WebDAV
server, we are able to put the vfb URL into a browser and watch it
come up no problems. Same with the fileserver version (using both the
UNC path and the file:// equivalent).

Here are our two non-working setups in Outlook:

Fileserver
----------------------
Publish address: \\FILESERVER\freebusy\joe.smith.vfb
Search address: \\FILESERVER\freebusy\%NAME%.vfb
(switching to file:// equivalents doesn't help)

WebDAV
----------------------
Publish address: http://192.168.20.46/freebusy/joe.smith.vfb
Search address: http://192.168.20.46/freebusy/%NAME%.vfb
(IP address is intentionally false, but the real machines are indeed
on 192.168.*.* addresses)

Thanks for reading all of this. We are stumped as to what's wrong.
We've tried reading the following Free/Busy related articles on
microsoft.com, but to no avail:

http://support.microsoft.com/KB/889698
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827775
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291621

Thank you so much for any advice!