Hi,

I've spent a couple of hours playing about with Outlook to see if I can
solve a problem that my manager has tasked me with.

In our department the standard method of booking holiday in your
calendar is to create an all-day event flagged as 'Busy' or 'Out of
Office', and to invite your manager as an attendee. The manager will
then approve or deny your holiday request by accepting or declining the
meeting notice.

However, the problem with this method is that it automatically ends up
blocking the manager's calendar for that day as 'Busy' or 'Out of
Office', meaning that nobody can properly schedule meetings with them.

I know it is possible for the manager to manually re-flag the
appointment as 'Free', but they are not keen to do this. Is there a way
I can set up a rule or a macro to automatically re-flag the message?
Failing that, is there an option I can use when sending the meeting
request so that it appears as 'Busy' on my calendar but 'Free' on those
of the attendees.

We use Outlook 2000, 2002 and 2003 in our organisation on an Exchange 6
server.

Many thanks in advance if anyone has any suggestions.

Cheers

Andy