Free/Busy info in Outlook 2007+ outside of Active Directory domain

Say you are running Outlook 2007 and for any number of reasons you are outside of Active Directory domain. As of now your Out Of Office Assistant and Free/Busy info in the calendar will not work. Without getting into too much detail of new Exchange 2007 protocol (see this article for more info) this happens because Exchange autodiscovery service is not setup properly. After some fiddling around I found a way to hack it. It takes only 5-10 minutes but goes a long way toward better user experience for yourself.

1. Obtain autodiscovery info
1. On a laptop that is inside Active Directory domain and running Outlook 2007+ CTRL-<right-click> on Outlook tray icon.
2. In the pop up menu choose Test E-mail Autoconfiguration.
3. Type in your email address (i.e. jkorabelnikov@yourcompany.com). Type in your domain password and hit Test (leave all checkboxes checked).
4. Once it finishes (hopefully successfully) go to XML tab, copy all of XML as-is and send it to yourself.
2. On your laptop take the XML you sent in previous step, create a new file C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OutlookAutoDiscover\<your_company_domain>.xml and put XML in there.
3. Now open up C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in a text editor and put a new entry of 127.0.0.1 autodiscover.<your_company_domain> there.
4. And finally run regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\AutoDiscover key. Right-click and choose New->String Value and name it <your_company_domain>. Once that's done double click on the new entry and type/paste the full file name C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OutlookAutoDiscover\<your_company_domain>.xml there.
5. Restart Outlook and you should be good to go!