Forum Discussion
Outlook 2016 defaults to an end date on recurring appointments now - need "no end date" fix
This is a dumb excuse. There are ways to make appointments dynamic, so it only shows you a 5+ year entry if you go that far into calendar. I don't believe it is even programmed the way you describe in Outlook now. I have plenty of no end date reminders and my Outlook is fine. I also leave only a few letters in my Inbox. I have nktice Outllook is usually horribly slow for those users who leave every email and have ten thousands of them in the inbox..
Indeed, it is my belief that a brand-new created recurring appointment is not "real" on every calendar occasion, but that it is generated when you view it from the "rule" you made.
If you mess with one of them (add a note, delete it etc.) then that one particular one becomes an exception and a "stand-alone" appointment, but all the others in the series are still just "virtual".
This is borne out by the fact that if you later go and set an end date, any before that date but which you have deleted magically reappear - implying that the rule puts them in but any exceptions have been cleared.
So there being no reason at all for this change, or at least not for it to be mandatory.
Understand, but that is not how it is, specially on the server side. The server has to be able to render those appointments all the way up to the end date, so, its there, on the server side ,rendering forever.
When the client (outlook desktop app) opens up, you can see on the bottom right how its "updating folders", and at that time, the client will connect to the server and the server has to have all those appointments ready to go so when you click on it, it can render it. Even when you go and you edit the first one, when it says "Edit just this one, or entire series", it has the "Entire Series" in memory, ready to be edited, in case that is the option you pick.
So, its just best to always have an end date, and your outlook will run faster and all of that.
You speak like you know the internal workings of Exchange/Outlook. What you describe is very inefficient from a programming standpoint.
Personally i don't remember what the default setting was. Currently it defaults to some date indeed. There is probably a reason for this change, but i can't think of one realistic. Other than some users complaining that they didn't want their events to go forever.
- You're right. Really, in cached mode, as a user scrolls through their outlook calendar it fetches that info from the exchange server only when they keep scrolling past the point that their client is set to cache (30 days, 60 days, 1 year, ect). This would be rare and still, not a big deal at all. Exchange Server can handle this easily. It's actually nothing to even talk about. I suspect Microsoft introduced this due to many large organizations migrating to O365. I wouldn't doubt that Microsoft has found that many custom internally programmed apps at various orgs are fetching the calendar data inefficiently and this is creating a burden on the O365 exchange servers. (that "could" be the cause. Various apps endlessly pulling this info via EWS calls). But yeah, under normal scenarios, this is NOT a problem. I'd put my money on O365 and various orgs taxing Microsoft's Exchange servers with inefficient programming. That's my guess.
Craig
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (Exchange 2010 and 2013)
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (O365)
