After finally getting around to setting up Alerts in Sharepoint for our users, I’ve come across a new issue where users can’t open the alerts in Outlook.
This is Sharepoint 2007 sending alerts to Outlook 2007 and yet they alerts can’t be opened at all, which struck me as quite odd. However it only took a quick Bing search to uncover the issue…it all comes down to Exchange.
Even though Sharepoint & Outlook are on 2007, if the alerts are being sent via an Exchange 2003 server this problem will occur “because Exchange 2003 cannot convert the MIME-type properties to MAPI-type properties correctly if the names of the properties begin with X-.”
Although Outlook needs to be running in Cached mode for this to occur I believe…
There is a hotfix that needs to be applied to the Exchange 2003 server (with SP2) and that is available here.
Big thanks to Joel Oleson for his blog post which gave me the answer here.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 