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 isnt perfect and weve had trouble with Blackberry and Google calendars in the past, but nothing like the trouble weve 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 theyve already accepted.
Its 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 cant be wrong and it must be a problem at our end - even if we havent 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.
Its been widely reported but in case youve missed it, heres a notice from MacRumors.
For the time being at least, were recommending that our people dont accept or reject meeting notices via phone. Its something I dont do because I had similar problems with may blackberry/google synch but this is the first time weve had to issue a company-wide warning.
Hopefully Apple and Microsoft will sort this one out soon.
