Company holidays

You are the administrator of your company Exchange Server. The office manager asks you about distributing holidays to employees to show local events such as company days out, holiday period office closures, away days and other company specific events.

 

How should you best distribute these?

 

1.    Meeting request.

2.    Outlook.hol file.

3.    As text in an email.

 

Let’s discount option 3 for a start – sending out a list of events and expecting staff to either remember them of transcribe them into email is a lot given the speed of the 21^st century.

 

Option 1 – meeting request. You create a new meeting request called “Office closed” and distribute to all staff (there should be a group for that). You set the date and time, put in your own notes about whether security will be there, who to contact in emergency, mark it as “Out of office”, set the category and hit send.

 

Option 2 – outlook.hol file. You close email and edit your outlook.hol file in notepad having spent a while looking for the file. You remember the format and remember to update the number of events in the section. You close and save the file then open Outlook to find that one event is missing because you used the UK date format of yyyy/dd/mm instead of yyyy/mm/dd. You correct this. The outlook.hol file gets sent to all staff, 50% of whom read it and ignore it, 30% of whom read it and overwrite their outlook.hol file but fail to update Outlook, 10% phone the Helpdesk to help them and the other 10% get all steps done themselves.

 

There are other ways to implement this, but a meeting request is fast and visible.