One feature key feature in the Outlook + Exchange pairing is calendar free/busy. This is the ability, when scheduling a meeting, to see the available times that the various invitees are free. Unfortunately, until recently there haven’t been very many good options for allowing non-Exchange users of Outlook to do the same1. I’ve been dying to find a reliable solution to the sharing of calendars in this way so that my wife and I can see each other’s schedules (especially valuable when we’re in different time zones and trying to connect with each other).
With Outlook 2007 there are now finally a couple of options. Outlook now supports publishing calendars (and updating them automatically) via WebDAV. Anyone who’s a Mac user out there, already knows that iCal has been supporting this for some time. This allows one to publish their calendar to any web server that supports WebDAV.
Additionally, Outlook also supports publishing and sharing calendars via the free Office Online (not to be confused with Office Live – don’t ask) service. However, when I tried to publish a restricted (read: password protected) calendar on the service it failed multiple times (in various ways). I eventually gave up2.
Instead, I went back to just using the WebDAV support in Outlook. Here are the steps I took to share my work calendar with my wife:
- Setup an Apache + WebDAV server on my home machine (actually on my Mac Mini) and configure it to require basic authentication for any DAV actions.
- Go to my work Outlook, calendar view, and right click on the icon for my main calendar in the left side task pane. Choose “Publish to Internet” > “Publish to WebDAV Server”.
- In the “Location” field fill out the URL to your DAV-enabled directory on the server. In “Detail” set the information you want to share (I want my wife to see everything on my calendar – I have no secrets from her <grin>, so I chose “Full Details”).
- In the “Advanced” button/dialog, ensure that “Automatic Uploads” are chosen. Also, you can include details on items marked as private here if you want.
- Hit “OK” and Outlook will start trying to upload the calendar data to the server. Assuming you have your server’s DAV directory password protected, you will be prompted with a Windows username/password authentication dialog. Fill this out and don’t forget to tell it to remember the credentials with the checkbox.
- You’ll be asked if you want to “send” this published invite information to anyone. Say “yes” as, even if you don’t want to send anything, this is the easiest way to the get the full URL that Outlook published the calendar to. This will open an email compose window with a URL of the calendar in question in the header. Copy down the URL and close/cancel the message.
And here are the steps required to allow my wife’s machine to read my published calendar:
- Go to Outlook and choose the “Tools” menu > “Account Settings”.
- In the Account Settings dialog, go to the “Internet Calendars” tab.
- Choose “New”.
- Enter the URL you wrote down from step 6 above (it should begin with webcal://).
- Choose “Add”.
- You’ll be prompted with the same Windows username/password dialog that you were when you published the calendar on the other box. Fill in the appropriate information and presto, you can now see the calendar (it appears on the left task/calendar pane under “Other Calendars”).
As an added bonus, as I noted above, any of my Mac machines can use iCal to read these calendars too. It’s a “nice to have” for me (my Macs are not my primary boxes), but cool nonetheless.
1 Yes, it is true, there are some Internet calendaring options out there. Windows Live Calendar + Outlook Connector should allow you to get your calendars and share them with others (if you’re a paying Hotmail Plus customer). However, I found this solution was awfully fragile and, historically, had little success with it. I have high hopes for the future WL Calendar releases. Other options like Google Calendar do allow users to publish their calendars out, but don’t allow them to use Outlook as their primary repository/editing method.
2 The Office Online sharing service also, if you choose to restrict your calendar access, uses Microsoft Passport (now Windows Live ID) to authenticate users. This is something I was hoping to avoid having to use.
