What are you doing?

I am a busy kind of person and not only am I normally doing something most days but I also shuffle activities around a lot to accommodate everything and everybody where possible.

So I asked around about how I can share my calendar with others so that they can see when I am free and the best answer I managed to receive was "take a screen shot of your Outlook calendar and email it to your mates". Since I was principally looking to keep my Mum up to date, this is not exactly a problem. But what about giving out your calendar automatically to people outside your Exchange server organisation?

Well I've found a way, its a little bit of a clever cheat but it allows you to take advantage of some really good features available in Outlook 2007 as well.

In Outlook 2007, if you right click on Calendar there is a great new feature called "Publish to Internet". There are 2 options here - to publish to "Office Online" (its a simple wizard) or publish to a custom server such as your own web server. But what does it actually do? Well from the look of it, you publish your own calendar from one date to another (default is 30 days ago to 60 days from now) into an ics file in the place you specify such as http://www.myserver.com/myfoldername and then Outlook pushes changes to your calendar up to that ics file on a send and receive basis like mere mortals do when they are not connected to an Exchange server.

BIG UPSIDE:

OK, so you need Outlook 2007 to do this, but that is all - Exchange 2003 works just as well for all you people out there who have not taken the plunge. Additionally the fact that it is done through ICS means that the file size is tiny.

Now anyone (with Outlook 2007) can do "File, Open, Calendar" and point at your ics file or just send them the URL. The publishing wizard even gives you the option to tell everyone about the published file.

And finally, the clever bit - the ICS file opens as a proper calendar within Outlook 2007 and you can do all of the funky bits of Outlook with it like overlay view and side by side view to allow you to dovetail meetings and events (remote ics user will be listed as "Out of Office", "Busy" or "Tentative" unless you change your calendar permissions - this is by default and by design, you don't really want to forget it is published and detail you are getting colonic irrigation at 4.30 now do you?).

What are the downsides to this? So far I can manage 2: Firstly, it is all well and good publishing the calendar for external users to check my availability, but my Mum is already a user on my Exchange server so I only needed to share my calendar with her. Secondly, it *DOES* mean that I shall await the email that says "Ooh, I see you are not busy on xxxx, how about we come over for dinner".

And that means I'll have to get the duster and the polish out.