Thomas' Work Space

Calendaring is still an underutilized data source, but sharing of and collaboration on calendars are picking up.

If you find yourself juggling more and more calendars of your own and others that are shared with you, you will want to organize your calendars by naming them.

In MS-Outlook, however, you may find that the renaming option is grayed out and disabled when trying to rename your Calendar:  .

To work around this issue, do this:

1. Download the Exchange 2003 Information Store Viewer to your computer.http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3D1C7482-4C6E-4EC5-983E-127100D71376&displaylang=en, unpack Mdbvu32.exe (CAUTION: THIS IS A POWERFUL UTILIITY THAT CAN ALTER YOUR DATA IN MANY WAYS, INCLUDING DELETING IT. HANDLE WITH CARE!).
2. Create an Outlook profile that can connect to the problem mailbox.[If you work on your own mailbox, you can skip this].
3. Run Mdbvu32.exe. Select the following three options and click OK: MAPI_FORCE_DOWNLOAD, MAPI_EXPLICIT_PROFILE, MAPI_NEW_SESSION
4. Make sure that the profile you have created in Step 2 [or your default profile] is selected. Click OK.
5. Click MDB -> OpenMessageStore.
6. Make sure the problem mailbox is selected and click Open.
7. Click MDB -> Open Root Folder.
8. Double-click “IPM_SUBTREE” in the left list (if for some reason you don’t see this double click each entry in the top/left until you get a folder list.)
9. Double-click the Calendar.
10. Click the “Call Function” button.
11. Click the “SetProps” button.
12. Make sure the “PR_Display_Name” is selected from the PropID list. Change its name to <whatever> in the textbox below and click the ”Add” button. You will see that the change action is added to the list. Click the “Call” button on the right-top corner to apply the change.
13. 4. Click Close until you drop out of the windows, then close the MDBVU utility and OK to the logoff. From: To:
14. You may need to close and reopen Outlook to refresh the folder name.
15. And voilà:

I just verified this to work on MS-Outlook 2007 against MS-Exchange 2007 (and assume it to work on stand-alone PST files also), and added the screenshots to clarify this. My thanks go to user traval and MS for the heavy lifting (although I wish MS would make my lifting still easier).