Calendar Etiquette

I often see articles which talk about Email Etiquette, but not too many on the effective use of Calendars. One of the most useful and time saving features of Microsoft Exchange is the ability to quickly book meetings with colleagues and to be able to see when your colleagues are free. Until you have used this feature and organised a meeting with multiple people it is hard to understand how much time is saved compared to the endless round of phone calls and emails which were typically needed to book a meeting with more than a couple of people.

One of my biggest bug-bears with Outlook which I got caught with again today is when you try and schedule a meeting but someone has booked the time off as holiday, but used an all-day appointment to mark the time off. By default Outlook marks all-day appointments as "Free" so when you look at the Free/Busy information they look like they are available for your meeting.  So my request is - please always set the "Free/Busy" information on all your Calendar requests - it will make the lives of your colleagues much easier :-)

Let me know what your Outlook bug-bears are. I'll publish the most common ones as articles within our KnowledgeBase to help share the knowledge.

Comments

[James H]

My biggest bug-bear is primarily with Outlook Web Access which I find to be a clunky and frustrating user experience when compared to something like Google Mail. I’m clearly not alone in this as this article illustrates a trend in employees auto-forwarding work email into their GMail accounts for easier ‘anywhere access’ and typically higher storage volumes. http://apcmag.com/4872/microsoft_takes_on_gmail_in_the_workplace_2gb_mailboxes - I’m sure this is a complete nightmare for the majority of organisations IT departments from a data security perspective.

Another article here suggests that Microsoft has shot itself in the foot with the poor performance issues of Exchange 2007 by creating an ‘advertisement for web email’.
http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/comment/2188929/put-outlook-trash