How do I do this in Outlook?

October 25, 2017 1:38 AM

During the week clients drop in to our workplace and are booked to meet one of my colleagues. At present I have access to all of my colleagues calenders. They make appointments in their calenders saying "available" and colour them yellow. I then open up their calendars and try to find one of these to book on. However, my colleagues are many and of varying IT-literacy and each of them also uses the same process when they are "on call". There's various things making it chaos. My dream scenario is inside, help me realise it.

We have a site inbox (info@). I "own" that and it has a calendar attached. I would like to share that out to the team and then have them put their bookable times *there*. So I would see "on tuesday at four, A B and D have available times, but C is already taken". So I would be looking at one calendar. I don't know quite what the right flow is or what settings to make though. They need to add the bookable-time and I need to be able to edit it to say "taken by Z" and change colour or whatever. I do not want that meeting to then show up in my calendar. This seems like it must be a super-normal thing to happen? Ideally the person gets notified that the meeting has been "changed".

posted by Iteki to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Why are they creating an appointment for their "available" time rather than leaving that open? It seems like a better solution would be for them to block off all the time they *aren't* available. Open times are easy to find in Outlook with the meeting scheduler tool. Then you could create a meeting for them during that open time with the title "taken by client Z."
posted by JuliaJellicoe at 4:21 AM on October 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

The word you are looking for is delegate. If you add delegates to the common calendar they can then edit it as if it's their own. It varies how to do from one version to another but try going to calendars, right clicking on the one in question, choose share, and then i think it says "delegate access" or "give access". The concept is a boss giving an assistant control if their calendar... Very common.
posted by chasles at 5:21 AM on October 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: No, they have to provide two bookable hours a week each, they can't just block their calenders the other times, they have other appointments, empty spaces, need to be able to be available for other meetings etc using the scheduler etc.
posted by Iteki at 7:48 AM on October 25, 2017

You are not trying to schedule something they are all attending, right? You just need to know when any one of them is available so you can schedule a meeting for the client and one of them? I suggest they invite the info@ email address to their Bookable Appointment. Have them put their own name as the Title. You might be able to auto-accept those appointments. Then they would show up on that calendar and not yours but you should be able to edit the details from the info@ box.
posted by soelo at 11:00 AM on October 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: It's actually worked out the other way round. They all got set as publishing editors to the info@ and they will make appointments in there inviting themselves as the only other participant. This lets people make changes in the info@calender and the person whose time it is sees that the change has happened both in the info@ and in their own calendars.
posted by Iteki at 8:03 AM on October 26, 2017