Managing Team Calendars
 By Nitin Paranjape / MAXOFFICE
The problem
Most business users require more than one calendar. One is the default personal calendar which is available from your base mailbox.
You need additional calendars for various different reasons:
- The most common reason is the sharing between boss and secretary. This is easily achieved by sharing the base calendar.
- You are working on a project and wish to maintain a separate calendar for it. Creating a new calendar in your mailbox will solve this problem.
- You are a part of a team and require a team calendar. Here also you could create a new calendar in your mailbox and share it with the team. But this is where the problem starts. Providing access to multiple persons is more cumbersome and IT dependent when using your mailbox. It can also slow down the performance. Sharing of calendars was designed for scenario 1 where two are three persons are sharing calendars; not for a group of people who are at multiple locations.
When you have multiple calendars, the schedule gets split. If you want to know your appointments for a given day, you will have to check in each active calendar separately. This leads to confusion and even missing some appointments.
Now let us explore how we can manage these issues efficiently.
Boss-Secretary calendar sharing
This is a very common scenario. Unfortunately there is a very alarming trend which is quite common. Large numbers of bosses share their entire mailbox with the secretaries. This is a security disaster.
Of course the secretaries may be trustworthy and have proven their credibility, but this is still a security nightmare. Most often the bosses don’t want to hurt the secretaries by displaying distrust. Therefore, the IT team should help them here. You should come up with a strict security policy which restricts sharing only to Calendars and not the entire mailbox.
Action Item: Make sure your top management is not sharing the entire mailbox with their secretaries. If yes, stop it immediately.
Confidential appointments
Usually the secretary manages all appointments. But in some cases, the boss may want to add some appointments/meetings which are confidential. This is possible, but not commonly known. The idea is very simple. When adding the new appointment, the boss should mark it as Private.
This private flag exists not just for calendars but for other mail items also. This is useful even when you are sharing a project calendar and there is some confidentiality to be maintained.
Team calendars
Sharing base mail system calendars across multiple persons is neither convenient nor effective. This kind of team work is not the base objective of a messaging system. You could potentially use Public Folders and create a calendar within it. However, many organizations have disabled the usage of public folders. Therefore, we need another method.
The solution is to use the shared calendar feature of collaboration tools rather than the mail system. As an example, here is how one of the collaboration tools, SharePoint, can help you manage team calendars.
SharePoint is designed to minimize the end user dependence on IT team and make them self-sufficient. With appropriate rights, any user can create a calendar on SharePoint. SharePoint is a web-based application. Therefore, the calendar will be available and accessible from the SharePoint site.
You can now add the team members/project stakeholders to the calendar. You will typically add two types of users:
- Those who will add/edit calendar items and meetings
- Those who just want to know the current calendar
Type 1 become the Contributors and Type 2 become the Readers.
Now the calendar is available centrally on the website. Any user with contribute permissions can add or edit appointments. This way you can easily create a shared, web-based calendar very easily.
But this is just the beginning—there are many more benefits of this approach.
Offline access
SharePoint calendar is available as a web page. To access it you must be connected to your intranet. The Personal calendar is available right within your mailbox on your desktop. You can access it even if you are roaming outside your intranet. This is obviously inconvenient.
The solution is simple.
Step 1 : Create the calendar on the SharePoint website
Step 2 : Connect it to Outlook for offline access and synchronization
From the Actions Menu, choose Connect to Outlook. And this calendar will be available right within your Outlook. This will be an additional calendar.
Now you can treat it just like Outlook calendar and add/edit appointments as usual. Once it is connected to Outlook, you do not need to go back to the web-based version at all.
During every Send/Receive, Outlook will automatically synchronize the shared calendar with SharePoint.
Ask each of your team members to connect the SharePoint calendar to their own Outlook profile. Once this is done, you have a very easy way of managing shared calendars across as many team members as required.
Automatic notification
SharePoint has a very powerful notification functionality. In a team calendar, one person may add an appointment, but other team members may not have had the time to check the calendar. They will simply not know the latest changes to the calendar. To prevent this, you can set automatic alerts.
Now, when any addition or editing is done to the calendar, all users receive an automatic e-mail informing them of the changes.
Alerts are also useful to inform other stakeholders about the progress of work or calendar changes without having to send them manual updates.
How to view multiple calendars
As this method of sharing calendars is very easy, soon you will have users with multiple calendars. The question now arises—how do you manage time across multiple calendars? To start with, Outlook can display more than one calendar. Each calendar is assigned a different color for ease of identification.
Unfortunately, more than three calendars are not viewable at one point of time due to limited screen space. Even with few calendars open, it is very difficult to understand at which part of the day you are free
or busy. This information is scattered across multiple calendars.
You have to exert additional mental effort to imagine how the combined calendars would look. Outlook solves this problem elegantly—it provides an Overlay Mode.
This ingenious feature combines all calendars together to give you a visually unified view of each day. The calendars, of course, remain separate internally.
Now you can get a complete picture of your personal as well as project-specific work. In the combined view, the color coding is still maintained. Each combined calendar is shown on the top as a tab. When you click on a particular calendars, appointments in that calendar become more prominent. This way you can still understand which appointment belongs to which calendar within the Overlay Mode.
Summary
- Use SharePoint (Windows SharePoint Services- which is a free add-on to Windows 2003) to create a collaboration site
- Allow users to create shared calendars in a specified area within the site
- Let users create and manage their own calendars
- Connect calendars to Outlook for Offline Access
- Enable alerts to automate notification of changes
- Use the overlay mode to get a combined view of your schedule across calendars.
Feedback
Do send me your feedback on nitin@maxoffice.biz.
Your suggestions for topics to be covered in this series are also welcome.
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