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Apple iOS6 Calendaring bug Affecting Exchange (and by extension, Lotus)

One of the things that the company I work for (and most others) do on a regular basis is send meeting invites to people at other companies and on various other systems.  Notes meeting handling isn't perfect and we've had trouble with Blackberry and Google calendars in the past, but nothing like the trouble we've had this week.

It seems that when we send a meeting invite out and one of our recipients cancels, they take over the meeting as chair and cancel it for the remaining participants too - even if they've already accepted.

It's taken us a while to get our head around the problem, particularly as it happened with several different meetings and multiple outside sources.  Naturally, you presume that several systems out there can't be wrong and it must be a problem at our end - even if we haven't changed anything.  Right?

Wrong!

As it turns out, the recently released Apple iOS 6 has a flaw which trips up Microsoft Exchange systems not configured according to best practice.  Lotus Notes/Domino handles things a little differently and we end up with two meetings but the net result is the same - embarrassment.

It's been widely reported but in case you've missed it, here's a notice from MacRumors.

For the time being at least, we're recommending that our people don't accept or reject meeting notices via phone.  It's something I don't do because I had similar problems with may blackberry/google synch but this is  the first time we've had to issue a company-wide warning.

Hopefully Apple and Microsoft will sort this one out soon.


Comments

Gavin Bollard said…
Apple released a patch iOS 6.0.1 today which fixes this issue.
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