Both Outlook and our AboutTime for Exchange Server product use free/busy time published by Microsoft Exchange to find available times in user’s calendars.  It’s great to be able to automatically find available time, but is the free/busy time published by Exchange always accurate?  If you are using Outlook 2007 or earlier with MS Exchange 2003 or earlier, the answer is “not all the time.”

Free/busy times in Exchange 2003 and earlier versions are created by having Outlook publish free/busy times to a special public folder.  By default, this information is published every fifteen minutes for the next two months.  In Outlook 2003, you can change these defaults by going into the Tools menu, selecting Options, clicking on the Calendar Options button, and then selecting Free/Busy Options.  You should see a dialog that looks like this:

You can increase the frequency that information is published and the number of months of free/busy information you want to publish.  Increasing either the frequency or the number of months, puts more load on the network and your Exchange servers, but increases the accuracy and availability of free/busy time.

There are other factors that can impact both the availability and the accuracy of Exchange free/busy time:

1. The special public folder is replicated to other Exchange servers at an interval defined by the Exchange system administrator.
2. The free/busy folder can get corrupted.
3. Outlook may be prevented from sending the free/busy messages (e.g., your VPN connection is not available).

In Exchange 2007, web services are used to get the free/busy data in real time.  Public folders are not used, so that issues with inaccurate free/busy data disappear.  For more information on Exchange free/busy time, see:

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/FreeBusy-Folders-Exchange-Server-2003-Depth.html

David Greer

Scheduling is a time consuming task.  To reduce the time needed to schedule, you can use Outlook and Microsoft Exchange.  For example, I needed to schedule a meeting today with Dave Harestad, eOptimize VP Products and Services.  We needed our small conference room and the projector. 

To automatically schedule our design meeting, I went into Outlook 2003 and created a new appointment.  I then selected the Scheduling tab which is near the top of the dialog. I next added Dave Harestad, Conference Room - Small, and the Projector (our system administrator had created the last two resources).  I entered 12:00 - 12:30 for the meeting time.  Next I clicked on the AutoPick Next >> button near the bottom of the dialog.  This is what it looked like:

On the bottom right you can see that Outlook automatically looked ahead and found the first time when all four people and resources were available, which happened to be 3:30 today.  Visually, you can see the vertical bar in white with green and red edges which are located in the 3:30 - 4:00 time period.

I’ve used Outlook for nearly a decade and it’s only since joining eOptimize that I discovered this useful feature of Outlook and Exchange for automating scheduling. How many other Outlook users have never used this feature?  I’m guessing that it’s quite a lot.

David Greer

Scheduling in Enterprise

At eOptimize, we focus on automating the scheduling of people and resources in large enterprises.  What’s surprising is how entrenched the people scheduling problem is in enterprises. Scheduling often falls into one of these categories:

• Individual scheduling.  You need to schedule a meeting with two other people, so you start the email exchanges.  Five or ten email messages later you finally have a date and time to meet.  Did you keep track of the time those email messages took?  I didn’t think so.
• Outlook and Exchange scheduling.  You can use the scheduling tab in Outlook to schedule a meeting within your organization.  I’ve been an Outlook and Exchange user for a decade and it’s only since joining eOptimize that I’ve started learning how to use the scheduling tab. 
• Full time schedulers.  If enough people and resources need to be scheduled, there are full time schedulers.  These schedulers often have tools to provide views into multiple people’s calendars.  They visually scan these multiple calendars until they can find an opening and jam in an appointment.  This is often augmented with paper-based systems or a dozen or more Excel spreadsheets.  Not only do organizations have to pay for the full time people, the schedules they create often have gaps, reducing utilization of the people they are scheduling.
• Automated scheduling.  Inform an application of what needs to be done and get the application to automatically find a set of openings.  In simple cases, this is easy. Once you need multiple people, or each person needs additional resources, or you have to pick the person with the right skills the problem quickly becomes incredibly complex.  Our scheduling platforms solve this problem, providing automated scheduling answers in seconds, no matter how difficult the scheduling problem.

Despite the depth of the challenges in scheduling people, there is no job title that includes scheduling.  You cannot go to business school and learn people scheduling. There are few recognized experts in optimizing people scheduling.  In future posts, we will shine a light on the people scheduling problem and provide solutions for reducing the need for scheduling time.  At the same time, we’ll show how automated scheduling increases your people resource utilization.

David Greer