Apple Help file says “From a Windows machine…”
We recently updated our Communications Director’s machine to Leopard (yes almost a year after it came out because of various reasons). This upgrade included moving him to Office 2008 and Entourage 2008.
I have said since Office 2008 came out that I didn’t care for Entourage, and wondered why it was so difficult for MS to create a Mac version of outlook that functioned the same way… Entourage just doesn’t.
One of the funniest parts of this migration was when Kirt called me to explain he wasn’t able to accept or decline events in Entourage, the buttons were there by grayed out. He could login to his virtual XP machine and Outlook worked without any issue but no dice for Entourage. Then Kirt reported he found in the online knowledge base the following:
Cause: When you receive an invitation in an Entourage account that is synchronized with an Exchange account running on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Exchange adds a tentative event to the Calendar.
Solution: Change your preferences for the Calendar in Outlook Web Access. From a Windows-based computer, log in to Outlook Web Access, and then click Options in the upper right corner of the screen.”
What you can’t control the settings from Entourage but you have to login to a PC? And not just login to a PC but in to OWA how crazy.
Long story short the problem wasn’t the above issue, as funny as the solution may be, but a known bug in Entourage. If you have someone in the organization selected as a delegate Entourage assumes you don’t want the ability to accept or decline meeting requests. By changing the delegate to just a Calendar Editor then the Accept/Deny buttons function properly.