Advance apologies for such a long-winded question, I feel it's necessary as otherwise many will try to answer this with features I already know are available, but do not quite fulfil my needs.
Currently, we are using an excel spreadsheet which has been formatted to appear as a monthly calendar, which is stored on a network location, to which everybody adds their personal & business appointments, meetings etc to.
We are now running Outlook 2010 over a network, using Exchange, so this seems like a good time to make use of the calendar function.
All we would like to achieve is the same functionality as the excel spreadsheet, with the addition of being able to 'invite' people to meetings and then the meetings being added into their calendar in such a way that they will appear in that user's 'home' section of Outlook.
Also, I would like to be able to, by looking at this single shared calendar, see everyones appointments/meetings etc, and then double clicking on a meeting name will open the meeting and allow me to view attendees.
I have, with more difficulty than I expected, found what I think is the best way to do this.
- I create a calendar, which I then “share” with everybody. Calendar permissions allows me to set permissions satisfactorily for everyone (i.e. can read all but write/edit/delete only their own ['author'])
- Now everyone can add/delete their own appointments – fine.
- I want to schedule a meeting with 5 people, this is where I was told Outlook would excel (unintentional office pun, sorry)… I can invite people to the meeting, even checking beforehand if they are all available using the scheduling assistant, but then I (or anyone who sets up a meeting) am greeted with the dialogue box:
“This meeting is not in the calendar folder for this account. Responses for this meeting will not be tallied”
- This has two implications, firstly it means that only the creator of the meeting can see who has responded to the meeting, and their response, because they are notified by (email) inbox messages. Conversely this means that anyone else who wants to see attendees, cannot. It also will mean that those people will appear to the scheduling assistant to be free, even if they have responded yes to the meeting, as it is not in their (default) personal calendar. Also, it’s annoying, and many of our “less able” computer users are scared off by even the most simple warning dialogues.
There are a number of ways around this that I could think of, but apparently none of them work…
- Everyone changes the ‘shared’ calendar to their default calendar – not possible as far as I know (perhaps this is something I need to talk to our IT dept about?)
- Creating a meeting in the shared calendar would sync it to all the invited and the creator’s personal calendars, so that responses ‘could’ be tallied, and then the scheduling assistant would work afterwards too, can't find the option for this anywhere...
Unfortunately neither of these seem to work.
Outlook seems to think that it is advantageous to force users to use multiple calendars, I can in fact create as many calendars as I like, however, only items in my default (personal) calendar will appear show me as busy, appear in my to-do list etc. etc. So I am not sure what the point in having more than one calendar might be, if I am going to miss everything in it…
The other-other way that it may be possible, is to request to share, everyone in the business unit’s calendars, then you can open them up all on top of each other (called overlay mode), but you just cannot see what is what.
I am just wondering if you are able to offer any solutions/insight to this, as I am really lost as to where to go from here.
Thanks in advance,
Will