How to have the same appointment in different cals (personal and public one)?

[Josh]

Hey everybody

My boss needs the following... We have about 40 employees in our company, and it's getting more and more, so it's becoming harder and harder to manage their holidays, because we need to have at least two employees that are allowed to sign important documents at the office everyday. So my boss wants the employees to have their "holiday-appointments" not only in their own calendar, but also in a public "holidays" calendar.

This requires the employees to manage their holidays-appointments redundantly and it's prone to problems when forgetting to change the appointment in one calendar after changing them in the other and vice versa.

So we are looking for a possibility to automatically sync the holiday-appointments from the personal calendars to the public calendar, so the employees only have to care about their own calendar anymore, and Outlook automatically copies them to the public calendar.

Is there a way to do this? Sadly I didn't find one...

Or is there a better way to accomplish what we need? Requirements are that data is only in Outlook (no 3rd party apps) and the employees don't have to manage their appointments on two calendars...



Thanks a lot for hints,
Josh

[SpiderTech]

Josh,

To aid you in finding the best possible way to accomplish your request can you please supply some additional information:

1. It appears you are on a Macintosh computer most likely using entourage. Are all the employess using Macs?
2. Are you currently on an exchange service?

keep us posted.

[Josh]

Hey SpiderTech

Thanks for your reply. I'm writing from my personal computer which indeed is a Mac, but my company only has Windows. They are using Office 2007 connected to an Exchange server (I don't know which version, is there an easy way to find out?).

[SpiderTech]

You can tell what version of outlook by selecting Help > about this Outlook.

Since you are on an exchange server,Microsfot has the ability to share calenders to all users under the same domain or server account. Since there is no way to updaet one calender to another i would have each user just update the holiday calender only. The calender can be shared to each user within your organization.

I double checked to see if a client side or server rule could be implemented and i had no luck in finding a positive solution.

I hope this helps.

[Josh]

Originally Posted by SpiderTech

Since there is no way to updaet one calender to another i would have each user just update the holiday calender only. The calender can be shared to each user within your organization.

The problem here is, that when I have to search for an appointment date that employee X, Y and Z are available, I always have to check their personal calendar AND the holiday calendar, too.

And for myself, I also won't have my holiday dates always in my head, so in the worst case I'm planning an appointment in the future and then miss it because I'm on holidays then! Imagine what the other employees that have approved for this appointment would think then. ;-)

Anyway, since Outlook doesn't offer such basic functionality, maybe I'm on the wrong track then? How do YOU guys plan your holidays in your company? I guess every company does it somehow, so there should be an easy way, shouldn't it?

Thanks
Josh

[SpiderTech]

Not sure this will help your organization, each employee makes a request for specific holiday time off. This request has to be approved then is posted to our holiday calender located in Sharepoint.

It would be the same scenario if we used Outlook. Within our Company we use our personal cal and have to update the office meeting cal for any appointments. Holidays or PTO are on one cal.

Hope this information was found helpful.