Sync'ing Outlook calendars for a team
There are plenty of programs that are able to synchronize calendars between different MS Outlook instances. Quite nice when one is working together with other folks and need to access other people's calendar data.
But that also brings up quite a few privacy issues. If you also entered your own (private) data into your company calendar (almost unavoidable if you sync with your cell phone) you won't like that everybody is able to access them. Additionally, if plenty of other people use the calendar the sum of all can become hard to understand. For exmaple, if there's one date "Go to important meeting" in the calendar - who entered it?
This is the reason why you need some adjustments whenever you're synchronizing a team calendar and a tool to support them. The privacy issue can be solved quite easily by keeping out items flagged as "private" in MS Outlook. But that could cause problems. Your secretary can't know which parts in your calendar are already blocked by non-business date.
This is the reason why you need the tool to have a better handling of the problem. Just like Easy2Sync for Outlook.(Calendar sync) It can take care of private calendar dates and change them. Depending on your preferences it can completely replace the existing name with a completely new one (like "private") or just add a text to it. The latter can be nice for highlighting the ownership of items that aren't private in the calendars by adding the owner's initials to the name.
That brings us to another item (which you can do with Easy2Sync for Outlook, too, btw). So far we just talked about a synchronization which normally is a one-one relationship of two MS Outlook directories. But perhaps that is not what you wanted. You'd rather keep your private calendar clean of the items of other people and have your own items appended to a office calendar which contains all dates. And not just added once - you probably want your changes to be synched to the team calendar, too. This is the reason why the tool should support another type apart from synchronizing. Easy2Sync f. Outlook names this sync merge task type.
We're at the end of this introduction about master calendars. Here's a short list of what's possible and what's to keep in mind with team calendars:
- Filtering private dates
- Modifing calendar items names or just appending names/initials
- Merging multiple calendars into one w/o changing the individual calendars
Have fun with your team calendar
About the Author
Thomas Holz is the inventor and developer of the Outlook synchronization software Easy2Sync for Outlook (http://www.easy2sync.com/en/produkte/e2s4o.php).
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