Scheduling a group meeting on Public Calendars in Outlook

[Russ Bishop]

Our office has begun using Exchange Server and Outlook
(including its Public Calendars) as our contact management
system. We have had Outlook on our PC's for years and are
comfortable using it, but we have been unable to schedule
a group meeting.

We have established a defined distribution group so that
when I try to schedule a meeting by clicking
the 'Schedules' tab in my 'Public' calendar and open
the 'group schedules' box for that team, I get a dialog
box that shows the public calendars of each of the team
members as a list of horizontal schedules by hour for the
date selected with any existing appointments noted.

When I select an available slot for all the members and
click on the "Make Meeting" tab, I select the 'new
appointment' tab, which brings up an appointment form. I
then select the 'Scheduling' tab and add the team members'
names. Once that form is filled out, sent and saved, it
appears on my public calendar, but on the 'private'
calendar of the other members.

There must be a way either to synchronize the public and
private calendars in Outlook; or to have the scheduling
function point to the 'public' calendars of all of us; or
to delete the private calendars altogether so that the
public calendar is all any of us uses. We need to be able
not only to have access to each other's calendars for
information purposes, but to be able to schedule
appointments for each other when necessary. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Do you mean that each person has a calendar folder in Public Folders? You
should be creating appointments in your Calendar folder in your Exchange
mailbox (and your mailbox should be your default information store).

 

[Russ Bishop]

Dear Sue,

Thanks for your prompt response!! I tried to reply
directly to you by email yesterday, but probably should
have used this method instead.

In answer to your question, each person does have a
calendar folder in Public Folders, and that is where we
are trying to create the group appointments. However, the
Public Folders/calendars have not been set as the default
folders or calendars and we have not been working through
the Exchange mailbox (at least I don't think we have) so I
don't think that's been set as our default information
store. How would we do that? Should we move our
individual public folders up the Explore Exchange "tree"
to the "branches" where our individual mailboxes reside?

Is there any way to copy appts automatically from our
private calendars to our public ones or to synchronize
them manually? Alternatively, can we replace our private
calendars with our public ones and solve the problem that
way?

There doesn't seem to be any "Help" for any of these
possiblities in the Exchange Help Index. Any place else
we can look for it?

Thanks again for your help,

Russ Bishop

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

The best procedure would be to get rid of the individual public calendars,
and use the Calendar folder in each mailbox for creating appointments. The
mailbox Calendar folder publishes free/busy information that you can access
from any Outlook appointment, without going through Group Schedules (and you
can see it in a Group Schedule, too).

Unless you have PST files in the profile, the mailbox is already the default
store. If you want to check, choose Tools | Email Accounts | View or change
existing e-mail accounts | Deliver new mail to the following location.

For tools to copy appointments between folders, see
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/sync.htm#exssync

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers