In the company where I work, we use Outlook to alert coworkers when we will
be out of the office for business travel or vacation. The mechanism we use is
to send a meeting request to the people we interact with the most that tells
them that we will be out of the office so that they have advance notice and
also get a popup reminder each morning that we will be gone. We set the time
to something early in the morning and give it 0 hrs duration.

This method works OK, but it could be improved. The problem is that if I am
going to be completely unavailable those days, I need to block of my calendar
so that no one can send me a meeting invite. But I can't send this full day
appointment to my colleagues, because that would also mark their schedule as
"Busy" or "Out of Office". So I have to take two steps: I have to create an
appointment to block my own schedule and then create the meeting request with
0 duration to send to my colleagues.

It would be great if when I created an appointment where I was going to be
out of office, I could have an option to include a simple reminder to members
of my contact list. That way, they would get a notice on the day I'm going to
be gone and a notation on their Outlook calendar, but it wouldn't block out
any time on their schedules. I sort of relate it to a milestone on a project
plan versus a task that has a time dimension.

Incidentally, this is the 3rd different company I've worked at where we've
used Outlook for this purpose. I think it's a fairly common practice.

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I posted a similar item on 7-25-06, see "Send notice for attachment to other
user calendars." I believe we are after the same issue. Glad to hear others
are "working around" this program weakness and others also see the need for a
program improvement.

Does anyone know how to tie the two posts together?

"jlind26" wrote:

In the company where I work, we use Outlook to alert coworkers when we will
be out of the office for business travel or vacation. The mechanism we use is
to send a meeting request to the people we interact with the most that tells
them that we will be out of the office so that they have advance notice and
also get a popup reminder each morning that we will be gone. We set the time
to something early in the morning and give it 0 hrs duration.

This method works OK, but it could be improved. The problem is that if I am
going to be completely unavailable those days, I need to block of my calendar
so that no one can send me a meeting invite. But I can't send this full day
appointment to my colleagues, because that would also mark their schedule as
"Busy" or "Out of Office". So I have to take two steps: I have to create an
appointment to block my own schedule and then create the meeting request with
0 duration to send to my colleagues.

It would be great if when I created an appointment where I was going to be
out of office, I could have an option to include a simple reminder to members
of my contact list. That way, they would get a notice on the day I'm going to
be gone and a notation on their Outlook calendar, but it wouldn't block out
any time on their schedules. I sort of relate it to a milestone on a project
plan versus a task that has a time dimension.

Incidentally, this is the 3rd different company I've worked at where we've
used Outlook for this purpose. I think it's a fairly common practice.

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm....calendari ng