Share your Outlook 2007 Calendar with anyone for free

I was asked recently by a client “I need to allow a third party to gain access to my diary. Is this easily set up without a major cost?”.  The advantages of this are obvious; Account Managers could let key clients see when they're free to make booking a meeting them easier; businesses who sell their services in time slots could let potential customers see when they're free, removing all the hassle from scheduling a visit.  Imagine my surprise when I looked into what was available and the answer was “Yes, you can do this, for free”! It’s very simple;

1. If you don’t already have one, create a ‘Windows Live ID’.  You don’t need to sign up to another email service like Hotmail or MSN, you just ‘associate’ your Windows Live ID with your existing email address (go to http://www.passport.net and select “Get Started Now” under the option “Use an e-mail address you already have”).
2. Go to http://office.microsoft.com and sign in with your new Windows Live ID, and it will take you through a brief registration process which takes about a minute to complete. Now you’re ready to publish your Calendar.
3. In Outlook 2007, right-click the calendar you want to publish in the navigation pane and select ‘Publish to Internet’ and ‘Publish to Office Online’.
4. As it’s the first time you’ve published your calendar it will ask you to sign in using your new Windows Live ID that you created above.
5. You can now select the time span that will be published (by default the previous 30 days and the next 60 days), the level of detail that will appear in the calendar (from just ‘Free’, ‘Busy’ etc up to full appointment details), and permissions (whether you restrict who can view the calendar, which would require them to use Windows Live ID, or whether anyone can view it).
6. At the end of the process, it will ask you whether you want to send an invite to people which contains a link they can click on to subscribe to the calendar so it appears in their Outlook 2007.

You can invite other people to view your calendar as required and send a URL to people who don’t use Outlook 2007 so they can view your calendar in a web browser (for example I have a test calendar published to https://calendars.office.microsoft.com/en-gb/pubcal/viewer.aspx?path=/pubcalstorage/qj1wnxmz721885/Richard_Bartlett_Calendar.ics).  For more information, see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA100809831033.aspx

28 October 2008

Richard Bartlett offers IT consultancy services to SMEs through his company RG Bartlett IT Services Ltd.  Contact him by email richard@rgbartlett.co.uk or visit his website at http://www.rgbartlett.co.uk