Outlook Calendar Publishing

May 5, 2008 3:44 PM

What is the best way to publish free/busy information from Outlook 2003?

I get a lot of (useless) email inquiries along the lines of "when would be a good time to talk?" I'd like to either hit a button and email a snapshot of my calendar (just free/busy, not appt details) or direct people to an url where they could self serve it in real time. Searches produce a lot of info on the deprecated internet publishing feature of Outlook 2003 and some inauspicious looking Outlook addins.

posted by jbradley to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I'm assuming these people aren't on the same outlook server (where they could use outlook's built in scheduling features to see your free/busy details).

If you are familiar with VBA for creating macros, you can use the freebusy method. The example on the page will work if you change "Nate Sun" to the way your name is listed when you send emails, and change the date to something current. You may have to change your security settings to allow macros, and may have to click okay when it asks if it can access your addressbook.

If you or someone you know is familiar with VBA, you can easily adapt this code to create a formatted list of busy / free times in response to a click of a button on your toolbar and even email it.
posted by i love cheese at 4:45 PM on May 5

also, you should fix the spelling error in "outllok" your tags
posted by i love cheese at 4:47 PM on May 5

I use the google calendar/outlook sync thing to create a google calender page url that I can give out.
Works for me.
posted by dripped at 7:16 PM on May 5

Would the Let's Meet functionality from Xobni do the trick? - obviously there's a lot more functionality you're gaining there but it does create an email of upcoming availability AND I love the phone number extraction, the search and the attachment finder; just gone into public beta too! I hope that helps.
posted by eb98jdb at 4:10 AM on May 6