Using Public Folders to Share Information
Public folders have long
been a staple of collaborative work via Outlook. Outlook 2007 continues
to support easy access of public folders. Public folders are often used
where mailing lists would be overkill. Rather than flooding mailboxes
of dozens of users with back-and-forth discussions, public folders are
used as a single storage point for these types of messages and various
users are granted access to read or write to these folders. Public
folders are also a great place to store common contacts or common
calendar items. This makes it easier to share information within a
subset of users in Exchange. Outlook 2007 makes it easy to access this
information centrally without it cluttering the global resources.
Using Group Schedules
Group schedules are a
fairly new feature and are only available to Outlook 2003 and 2007
clients. Group schedules enable the user to create groups of users
enabling a quick view of their calendars. The Group Schedules features
also allow a user to send all the members of the Group Schedule an email
or a meeting request using a single address. This makes it very easy
for a user to group together commonly used resources for a quick view of
availability. This might include a list of conference rooms in a given
building or could be members of a team for a project they are working
on. By arranging these resources together
into a group schedule, the user can avoid the tedious process of
inviting all of the resources individually to a meeting to see when they
are available.
Configuring Group Schedules
Users can create multiple group schedules to help them organize resources into logical groups.
To create a new group schedule, follow these steps:
1. | From the Calendar view, click Actions; then click View Group Schedules. The Group Schedules dialog box opens.
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2. | Click New.
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3. | Name the group schedule and click OK.
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4. | The Customized Group Schedules dialog box opens.
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5. | Click Add Others and select Add from Address Book or Add Public Folder
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6. | Type
the name of the user(s) in the Type Name or Select from List box, and
click To after each user has been selected. Alternatively, select the
user from the list and double-click the name to add him to the To field.
When finished, click OK.
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7. | Click Save and Close.
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After the group schedule has been created, to view it and work with it, follow these steps:
1. | From the Calendar view, click Actions; then click View Group Schedules. The Group Schedules dialog box opens.
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2. | Select the group schedule to view and click Open.
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3. | A screen similar to the one shown in Figure 5 appears.
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Sending Email or Meeting Requests to Group Schedules
Organizing
subsets of user or resources into group schedules can also be very
useful for sending emails or meeting requests. In this sense, the group
schedule acts similarly to a distribution group.
To schedule a meeting, follow these steps:
1. | Click Make Meeting from within the Group Schedule view for the specific group.
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2. | Choose
New Meeting to just send the meeting request to one member or select
New Meeting with All to send the meeting request to all members of the
group schedule.
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3. | Fill out the meeting request as you normally would.
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To send an email, follow these steps:
1. | Click Make Meeting.
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2. | Choose
New Mail Message to send to an individual member of the group, or
select New Mail Message to All to send to the whole group.
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3. | Fill out the email message as you normally would, and send the message.
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Note
It is
important to realize that group schedules created in this way are only
available to the user who created them. Other members of the group
schedule who wanted similar functionality would have to create their own
group schedule.
