Department Calendars

[wilsons935]

We have recently migrated from GroupWise 6 to Exchange 2003 using
Outlook 2003 SP2 Clients.

We have a number of departments which wish to operate a departmental
diary. The method of operation should be as follows:

All users in the department can schedule appointments into the diary.
All appointments should be auto accepted (as tentative if need be) and
as such should appear in the diary automatically without the
appointment being opened or previewed in the reading pane.
All users shoud be able to open the departmental diary as a shared
calendar and see all the appointments

(This worked in GroupWise - every appointment sent to a user (the
department diary user) was automatically shown in the diary as a
tentative appointment.)

The reasoning behind this is that the diaries are being used to record
dates of important events that all members of the department should be
able to see but do not want appearing in all their individual diaries.
They also do not want to have to have someone administer the diary by
opening and accepting appointments and it does not matter if two
appointments conflict.

Looking at the options:

1) Set up the diary as a resource and turn on autoaccept. Would this
work (even though the requirement of a departmental diary is not
really a resource). Does this make the scheduling of the appointment
more complicated?

2) Make the diary a public folder - would this then work?

3) Setup the Diary user with a rule or script to auto accept
appointments - can you do this and if so any pointers to the scripts
and how they should be assigned.

4) Any other thoughts to achive this?

All help greatly appreciated.

Al Patch

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

#2 is probably the least troublesome. If you use #1, users may need to remember to invite the diary as a resource.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers