Forum Discussion
Best Setup for Office 365 Vacation Calendar
So i would do this a bit different than what people described, but that is probably due to my background.
Especially if your current organization is not using SharePoint I think you are going to have trouble getting people to adopt into this.
I would do this through a resource mailbox in Exchange Online, atleast in the original scenario of a 30 person company. The more people you have, the more I think you may want to look at a Public Folder, or indeed SharePoint.
Create a "room mailbox" called Time Off Calendar. Set the management permissions to be managed by a person. Set that person to be whoever you want to control/approve timeoff requests. Users would submit their timeoff to the resource calendar by sending a meeting invite, and the person in charge could approve or deny it.
Adam
I'm seeking a simple Outlook solution to create a Vacation or Visitor calendar where employees can put Vacation or Visitors on a public calendar that everyone can see. I'd like this to be done in a single transaction from their own email calendar. No work flow or approvals required. Just a public "whiteboard" for everyone to see who is on Vacation or whether there are any Visitors scheduled and when. One example, if I am out of the office next Wednesday, I'd like to schedule that on my calendar so that it shows me out of the office, send a copy to my boss so she knows and can add it to her calendar if she chooses, and then put it on the public calendar so everyone in the office knows I will be out of the office as well (but it doesn't clog up everyone's inbox with a calendar or email entry if they don't care that I'll be OOTO). Setting up a separate public calendar where a separate transaction is required is not an acceptable solution due to the negative "productivity perception" of having to complete two transactions. As simple as this sounds, my IT department has been unable to provide me a solution.
Now that there are unified groups which create a recipient type of GroupMailbox wouldn't it be nice to be able to set the automated calendar features of this mailbox type to use it as a vacation tracking calendar?. I know my manager of my department is wanting to track his reports' PTO, and would like to approve/reject them prior to them getting posted to our team calendar. Since we already have a Microsoft team set up for this, which has created a GroupMailbox why not let me set the ResourceDelegate up as my manager? Instead I receive the error that the recipient type must be set as a resource.
Worked for me. Thanks
I know this is a few years late, but I had the same problem. Although I used a Room, my belief is that a Resource would also work. We wanted a shared vacation calendar WITH approvals required. Hope this helps someone. I found this infuriatingly difficult to find a solution. But once I had the solution it was simple.
USE OLD Exchange Admin Center
- create room ooovaca and save
- edit room
- booking delegates
- select delegates...
- add delegates to list
- booking options
- allow repeating
- max booking time 730 (two years)
- max duration 0 (unlimited)
- save
In PowerShell
set-CalendarProcessing ooovaca -AddOrganizerToSubject $true -DeleteComments $false -DeleteSubject $false //this is so that viewers can see who made the request (in case they just said "Going to NC" in the subject)
set-calendarprocessing ooovaca -allowconflicts $true //so that multiple people could be on vacation at once
- Yes! You have to check them individually this way! You can select several and have them in a single view as a default calander view though but not 40 :)
But also having 1 calendar for 40 people will be cumbersome when people start filling it! The view of this calendar will not be friendly either! If you want a separate calendar you can use a shared one or a 365 group calendar! A sharepoint calendar works basically the same as a shared one but you loose some exchange functionality! They have the option to add to their calendar as well!
If you use a office 365 group calendar you can set policy’s via powershell to subscribe everyone in the group to this, meaning they will receive a mail, add it themself to theirs etc.. Thanks Adam. It sounds like the option you've suggested then requires me to check everyone's calendar to see if they are in the office. We have 40 people in the office, so even if I have linked to their calendars....that gets cumbersome fast. I want to look at one calendar and see who is out of the office for the day or the week......and offer that same functionality for everyone in the office. Again the example of a calendar "whiteboard" is the best visualization of what I'd like to achieve. Simple, flexible, functional. If it works, I may consider the same idea for a calendar that tells everyone when customers, corporate executives, or other visitors will be in the building. Having said that one of the basic principles needs to be simplicity; if Outlook calendaring does not offer this simple bit of functionality, I might consider SharePoint.....but haven't used it in awhile and don't know how simple that solution would be to develop or to use.
- If sharepoint calendars is out of the question and outlook is to be used, there’s either a shared calendar or using your own! I belive using only your own calendar is the way to go...make sure all people necessary share their calendar with free/busy and all other wanted permission like read on subject or all information! That way it’s easy to add each other’s calendar and get information!
If you like your boss to receive a mail and possibility to add to their own calendar just create an activity ( Vacation ) and add your boss! He/she will receive a mail and can add the activity to his/her own calendar
I think this solution is the most used one and also the simplest one because you only use your own calendar and everyone have access to as much information as you’d like
Adam
