Forum Discussion
Executive Out-Of-Office Calendar
Office 365 2016 with Exchange online. We are all new to this environment. The boss wants a calendar on which all execs can indicate times they will be out of the office. I'm guessing an Office ...
Why create an extra calendar that has to be managed? Why don't the execs (or any group of employees) just use their existing calendars to let others know when they are out?
For my work group, when I'm out, I make an all day event that I'm out, and send it to my group. Then that appears in all of my co-workers calendars and they don't have to go looking at another calendar to see when I'm out. When they are out they send the same kind of thing to the group.
So in the example below I can see my co-worker M is out Monday - Tuesday, K is out Wednesday, P is out Monday, and F is out Monday - Wednesday.
- This practice makes my skin crawl when used. This always makes people accept out of office meeting requests and puts their own status in Teams as Out of Office all the time. :P It's also annoying and junks up my calendar. No offense but I just don't like it at all :)
You're on the right path, people should just use their calendars. If they want to see everyone's OOF you can actually just create a Group (not office 365) of their calendars and open them in Outlook with a single click, to overlay them all to look at their availability. This is my prefered method. Assuming there isn't 20+ of them that needs to do this.
ChrisWebbTech wrote:
This practice makes my skin crawl when used. This always makes people accept out of office meeting requests and puts their own status in Teams as Out of Office all the time. :P It's also annoying and junks up my calendar. No offense but I just don't like it at all :)
You're on the right path, people should just use their calendars. If they want to see everyone's OOF you can actually just create a Group (not office 365) of their calendars and open them in Outlook with a single click, to overlay them all to look at their availability. This is my prefered method. Assuming there isn't 20+ of them that needs to do this.I never accept the calendar items that I receive from my co-workers and since the all day events are marked as "Free" then they do not interfere with Teams or Skype availability.
We are a group of 6 so only during the holidays does it get busy, but the rest of the year the calendars are fairly empty.
- What works, works !!
What if there is an invite you are suppose to accept then? :)
- Yeah! This is precisely what I was saying and from experience also, thinks this will be the most efficient solution most times
- Basically use a Calendar Group > Add calendar from address book. And you can quickly add the execs. If there is an e-mail group of them it's one click. Then you can click this group when you need to look at the calendars overlayed, and or use the "Schedule View" which is what most people use when trying to schedule their own OOF or a meeting around people's availability.
Good opportunity for user education vs. adding an additional place for them to track something they already set / use.Also if Active Directory manager field is used and they have common CEO all the execs are part of they already have a calendar group for Team automatically generated in later office releases that you can click to get all your peer's calendar availability.
- When you say send it to the group, what do you mean?
adam deltinger wrote:
When you say send it to the group, what do you mean?My group of co-workers. We have a DL for the 6 of us.
