Anyone know how to to book meeting rooms for Outlook AND Entourage?

February 16, 2011 3:09 PM

Hi MeFites :) My current workplace has a mix of PC's and Macs and I need to find an easy way to book a meeting room that will work for everyone (some on Outlook 2007, some on Entourage Mac 2008).

Hi MeFites :) My current workplace has a mix of PC's and Macs and I need to find an easy way to book a meeting room that will work for everyone (some on Outlook 2007, some on Entourage Mac 2008).

I've tried setting up a meeting room resource in Outlook but the whole process does my head in and I'm thinking surely there must be an easier way?

Basically we have one main boardroom and need a way to:

a) See if it's already been booked by someone else in the team.
b) If not be able to book it and everyone else in the team will be able to see the timeslot that's been booked out.
c) This process to work for both Outlook 2007 on a PC, and Entourage 2008 on a Mac.

Are any of you extremely talented and helpful individuals able to give me a hand (flattery - is it getting me anywhere?!?) :)

I'd love either an idiots guide/walkthrough of how to do this OR recommendations for a good free online app that will do the same thing?

Many thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

Your technology-challenged friend,

- Katala

posted by katala to Technology (3 answers total)

Do you have an Exchange server that you are running off of? I made a public folder in Exchange and created a Calendar named "Conference Room". Then I gave our receptionist edit rights to that calendar, and everyone else view rights, so that they could all see when that calendar was available. That way she's the only one that can update it, and people usually just add her to the scheduling request to get the conference room calendar updated.
posted by msbutah at 3:39 PM on February 16, 2011

This approach is too long to write out as an idiot's guide, but hopefully the broad strokes give you some ideas of what you can do:

Search for "outlook google calendar sync" and "entourage google calendar sync".

Keep the schedule in Google Calendar and have users sync their Outlook and Entourage with your room calendar.

Share the Google Calendar room schedule with others, so that they can open up and edit it with their web browsers.

That's probably the free-est solution you'll find.

A more complicated and expensive option is to get a sys admin to set up a Microsoft Exchange Server and buy licenses for your end users. You or the sys admin would administrate a special calendar for rooms. Both Outlook and Entourage can pull calendar data from the Exchange Server service. This will be the cleanest solution for your end users, if they need to use those applications.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:43 PM on February 16, 2011

I am not sure how all the technical details work, but at our office (also a mix of mac/pc) our IT group set up email addresses for each conference room so we can view the schedule of the room and invite them to meetings.
posted by elvissa at 5:28 AM on February 17, 2011