By Eric Legault, a Microsoft MVP and founder of Collaborative Innovations, a Micro-ISV and consulting services provider specializing on Microsoft messaging and collaboration solutions. Eric also maintains a blog on Outlook programming and Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies.

Applies to
Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003

One of the greatest strengths of Outlook is its ability to manage multiple kinds of data. When you're faced with scenarios such as planning or organizing your day-to-day activities by creating to-do lists, booking appointments, searching address books, or exchanging e-mails with colleagues or family, Outlook makes these tasks intuitive and instantly accessible. When you pair Outlook with an enterprise solution like Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, users in businesses of all sizes gain an even more powerful combination of tools to meet their messaging and collaboration needs. Of course, many home users and small businesses don't use Exchange. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways to share your e-mail, appointments, contacts, tasks, and notes with other Outlook users.

Accessing other people's calendars

Outlook has supported sharing your appointment availability with other users since Microsoft Outlook 98 by using the Internet Free/Busy feature. By using the Web site storage space that many Internet service providers (ISPs) bundle with the majority of dial-up and high-speed packages, you can use your Web site as a publicly accessible location to store this data.

 Important   For users of the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy (OIFB) feature that uses servers from Microsoft to provide this information: This service is scheduled to be deactivated on October 15, 2004. If you are an existing OIFB user, you can continue to use the service, but no new users will be accepted. Furthermore, if you install Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 1, the OIFB features will be removed. See Office Internet free/busy features are removed when you install Outlook 2003 Service Pack 1.

Publishing free/busy information

Once you've obtained access to your Web server, configuring Free/Busy is a snap. On the Tools menu, click Options. Click the Preferences tab, and then click Calendar Options. In the Calendar Options dialog box, click Free/Busy Options, which brings you to the Free/Busy Options dialog box (see Figure 1). All you have to do to get started is to select the Publish at my location check box. This is where you need to enter the URL to your Web site address (or a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server that provides access to your Web site folders), which can can include FTP or HTTP URLs or file URLs:

ftp://My server/Freebusy/My name.vfb

http://My server/Freebusy/My name.vfb

file://\\Computer name\Freebusy\My name.vfb

If you use an FTP server and it does not have anonymous access enabled, you must provide a user name and password in the following format:

ftp://User:Password@ftp.domain.com/Users folder/Freebusy/My name.vfb

The directory structure doesn't have to be the same as listed above, as you can use any number of nested folders that are named whatever you desire, or you can store the .vfb files in the root directory. Just make sure that the paths on the server matches the publish location in Outlook.

Alternately, if you have a Microsoft Windows® or a Peer-To-Peer network, you can store the free/busy information on another computer that you have access to (like a file server or a shared folder) instead of an FTP or Web server. This can be useful in small business environments when you frequently need to check the availability of a coworker and you can't or don't want to store free/busy information on the Internet. However, keep in mind that free/busy data stored on your network will not be accessible to people over the Internet.

Scheduling meetings with Internet Free/Busy

Now that your availability information is published, other people can determine whether you are free or busy when creating meeting requests within Outlook. The primary mechanism for this is through the Scheduling tab of a meeting request. For each attendee, Outlook searches a global location or a contact-specific location to determine the availability of the people who are being invited to the meeting.

The global location is typed in the Search location box in the Free/Busy Options dialog box. This is where users who need to access other people's availability have to enter a similar address to the publish location:

ftp://%SERVER%/Freebusy/%NAME%.vfb

http://%SERVER%/Freebusy/%NAME%.vfb

file://\\Computer name\Freebusy\%NAME%.vfb

The %SERVER% and %NAME% variables are important — they allow Outlook to determine where a person's free/busy information might be stored by the format of their e-mail address.

Real-world example

To illustrate an end-to-end free/busy solution, let's examine a fictional company called Adventure Works. This company has three employees who have e-mail accounts through Adventure-works.com, which also hosts the company's domain name (adventure-works.com) for the corporate Web site and allows anonymous FTP access for sharing files over the Internet in the "pub" directory. As the company owner, you want all of your employees to share their free/busy information.

On each employee's computer, you have to configure the following information for the Publish at my location box in the Free/Busy Options dialog box:

ftp://adventure-works.com/pub/Freebusy/Boss.vbf (your computer)

ftp://adventure-works.com/pub/Freebusy/Employee1.vbf (Employee1's computer)

ftp://adventure-works.com/pub/Freebusy/Employee2.vbf (Employee2's computer)

To enable searching of the published information, you have to enter this in the Search location box on every computer:

ftp://%SERVER%/pub/Freebusy/%NAME%.vbf

The default time interval for automatically publishing free/busy information is 15 minutes, but if you want to manually publish the information after entering the publish location, just point to Send/Receive on the Tools menu, and then click Free/Busy Information.

Now let's suppose that you have an important relationship with Joe the sales rep at one of your vendors, and you wish to share your free/busy information with him because you frequently have meetings with each other. For security reasons, you don't want him to have publishing access to your company's Web site, so he won't be able to store his information there. Joe's company also manages their free/busy information on their own Web server. To get at Joe's free/busy data, open his Outlook contact item and enter the location of his free/busy .vbf file that he has provided you with in the Address field under Internet Free-Busy on the Details tab of the Contact form. When you go to create a meeting request and enter someone@example.com, Outlook sees this address as belonging to an Outlook contact and retrieves the location of Joe's .vbf file from the contact item. Outlook then queries this address on the Internet to retrieve Joe's free/busy information and updates the time block for the calendar view with his published availability.

For the employees in your company, the process is similar. However, since everybody has a global search location defined, Outlook doesn't have to look up the contact information. For example, if you create a meeting request and add employee1@adventure-works.com, Outlook parses the values from the address to look for ftp://adventure-works.com/pub/Freebusy/Employee1.vbf as per the substitution rules you created earlier.

For more information on configuring Free/Busy options, see:

How to use the Internet Free-Busy feature (Outlook 2003)

How to use the Internet Free/Busy feature (Outlook 2002)

How to use the Internet Free/Busy feature (Outlook 2000)

Publishing full calendar information

One limitation of using the Internet Free/Busy service is that you cannot see the full details of an individual's appointment, nor can you effectively see more than two weeks of free/busy time at a glance within the meeting request. Outlook has a nifty feature that can create a Web page for you automatically which contains a full calendar view for the dates you specify, along with the full appointment details.

To publish your calendar, click Save as Web Page on the File menu while in your Calendar view. In the dialog box, you can specify the date range and a background graphic, amongst other things. After you choose a file location, your Calendar Web page is good to go! Just publish it to your ISP's Web server or a shared location on your network, and your schedule is readily available for viewing by anyone with access. However, this information is read-only to others and does not get automatically updated when your appointments change. You'll need to republish your calendar periodically whenever you make modifications.

 Note   Publishing your calendar requires that you have the Web Publishing Wizard installed. You can download the wizard from the Microsoft Download Center.

For more information, see Publishing Outlook Calendars on the Internet or an Intranet.

Sharing contact and appointment items

One quick and easy way to share individual contacts or appointments is to simply forward them via e-mail as attachments to people who need them. Outlook makes this easy to do within the Contact and Appointment forms via the Actions menu — simply click Forward. This quickly creates a new e-mail with the selected/open item included as an .msg attachment. Be careful though — you must make sure that Outlook is properly configured to send these attachments, or the recipient will receive the attachment as a blank message. For starters, make sure that the message format is set to Rich Text, and that Outlook does not convert Rich Text messages to HTML. (On the Tools menu, click Options. On the Mail Format tab, click Internet Format. Under Outlook Rich Text options, click Send using Outlook Rich Text format in the list.) Lastly, if the person to whom you are sending is included in your Contacts folder, double-click their e-mail address in their contact to verify that Rich Text is chosen as the e-mail format.

A far better and easier option is to save contacts as vCard files (.vcf) and appointments as vCalendar (.vcs) or iCalendar (.ics) files. These formats are widely used by many e-mail and PIM (Personal Information Manager) applications other than Outlook and should be used instead of sending .msg files, especially if you are unsure what e-mail program the person you are sharing your information with is using. Outlook also includes the Forward as iCalendar and Forward as vCard commands on the Action menu to make it easy to send these files. For more information on the vCard, vCalendar, and iCalendar specifications, see vCard and vCalendar on the Internet Mail Consortium Web site.

If you need to share a large number of contact or appointment items with other Outlook users, the best distribution mechanism is to export the contents of your Contacts or Calendar folder to a Personal Folders File (.pst). The Import and Export option on the File menu allows you to export all or a filtered subset of folder information, which can then be easily imported using the same wizard on another user's computer. Compressing this file with a utility like WinZip is a good idea if you need to e-mail the .pst file, as they can become quite large. You will also have to exit Outlook before you work with this file to release an exclusive lock that prevents it from being accessed.

For more information and a listing of third-party tools relating to contact and appointment items, see:

Contact Tools for Microsoft Outlook

Shared Address Books for Microsoft Outlook

Calendar Tools for Microsoft Outlook

Sharing e-mail messages

Don't worry — I'm not going to recommend you manually forward each and every e-mail message that you want to share! Large amounts of e-mails can be exported using the Import and Export Wizard just like the approach above described for contact and appointment items. However, it is strictly a manual process and not the most realistic in many scenarios.

The most common situation that demands a method to share e-mails effectively is when more than one person needs to monitor an e-mail address. The best way to do this is to give these people access to the same e-mail account, supposing that you are okay with the obvious security issues! Then it is quite easy to set up a mail-sharing solution, depending on whether your e-mail account uses Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).

POP accounts are the most widely used. One key feature of this type of account is the ability to leave messages on the server after you download them. Otherwise, if you have a mailbox somewhere with existing e-mail messages that more than one person needs to read, as soon as one person connects to the mailbox, by default these messages are removed from your ISP's mail server and stored in the Outlook .pst file. The next time somebody else connects to the mailbox, the messages are of course gone — so make sure you turn this on before you do a send/receive to ensure that existing messages will remain for other users to download.

When the time comes for you to empty the remote mailbox, simply have one person temporarily disable this setting, download the entire contents with the next send/receive, and re-enable. Furthermore, there are other settings to remove messages from the server after a certain time period, or to delete the messages from the remote server when Outlook essentially detects two deletions of an e-mail message — the first deletion, and again when it is deleted in the Deleted Items folder. These settings are controlled via the Tools menu, E-mail Accounts command. On the first page of the E-mail Accounts Wizard, click View or change existing e-mail accounts. Click Change on the next page, click More Settings, and then click the Advanced tab (see Figure 2).

IMAP accounts are a little different. Unlike POP accounts, where all e-mails can only be accessed after they have been downloaded locally, IMAP messages are always stored on the server. If you share your IMAP account with other people, make sure that everybody is aware of the different method for deleting messages. When you delete a message, it's simply marked as deleted by displaying it with a strikethrough font through the message in the folder view. The message actually remains in a deleted but accessible state until you click Purge Deleted Messages on the Edit menu from the folder view, and these messages are then permanently removed.

Another benefit of using IMAP over POP accounts is that you can simply download the message headers, without the full body content, and choose which ones you want to mark for downloading. Any messages that are fully downloaded are then available for viewing offline. Furthermore, IMAP keeps your sanity intact when it comes to "read mail" management. When you download POP mail from multiple locations, there is no mechanism to track which mail you may have already read from a previous location when you download them again later on another Outlook client. But IMAP knows which messages have been read!

How to "really" share all of your Outlook information

Although the above approaches are free and easy to implement, there are some limitations to be aware of. Sharing free/busy information doesn't provide detailed access to appointment data, and exported Web calendars are read-only. Distributing contact and appointment items via e-mail also doesn't solve the synchronization problem of having multiple copies of that information stored in various locations. Also, with POP and IMAP accounts, you can only access e-mail messages on the remote mailbox — no contact, appointment, task, or note items can be stored on the server (except as attachments to e-mail messages, of course).

MSN Premium

A very powerful, easy, and affordable way to share and update Outlook data in multiple locations can be achieved by purchasing one shared MSN® Premium account and registering for a free Microsoft .NET Passport. When used in conjunction with the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for MSN, you have near real-time access to changes, modifications, and deletions of all e-mails, appointments, tasks, notes, and contacts stored either in Outlook or on the MSN server via the MSN Explorer or the MSN Hotmail® Web interface.

By distributing the MSN account name and password to all the people who need access, your family or coworkers can all share the same data. For example, you can register an MSN Premium account to use the e-mail address someone@example.com or someone2@example.com. Each user would need to have Outlook installed, of course, and then install the Outlook Connector for MSN.

Another benefit of MSN Premium is that you can have up to 11 accounts. Indeed, you can have multiple MSN Mailboxes loaded in Outlook — one for your group account, and another private account. A good practice to keep in mind with the group account is to not use it to send e-mail. This will protect that address from being harvested by spammers — the last thing you want is spreading any junk mail you might receive amongst multiple Outlook installations.

Once it is installed, you now have a separate MSN Mailbox folder structure in Outlook (this is NOT a .pst) with some familiar folders — Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, Sent Items, Notes, and Tasks — ALL of which can be shared. You can also access this same information outside of Outlook in two other ways — remotely via the MSN Hotmail Web interface, or with the MSN Explorer (which is free for download, or can be installed with your MSN Premium Setup CD).

Your data is also very easily synchronized. Every time you edit, add, or delete information in your Outlook MSN Mailbox folders, the changes are sent to the MSN server during the next send/receive cycle. Modifications in MSN Hotmail or MSN Explorer work the same way, by sending the changes back to Outlook via the Connector by using the Synchronize command in MSN.

However, there are a few caveats to be aware of:

• The Outlook Connector for MSN requires Outlook 2002 SP 2 or later.
• Note items cannot be viewed in MSN Explorer, only in MSN Hotmail.
• You can only create Mail or Post folders in Outlook's MSN Mailbox hierarchy.
• Tasks stored in MSN only support a limited number of Outlook Task fields — Subject, Due Date, Status (only the Not started, In progress, and Completed choices), Priority, the message body, and Category.
• Only one Category can be applied to MSN Tasks and Appointments, and the one chosen in Outlook must match one from the custom Category list in MSN.
• Categories for Outlook contacts and e-mails do not have an equivalent in MSN.
• Many Outlook contact properties that are business related do not exist in MSN Contacts.
• The Private and Label properties do not translate between Outlook and MSN appointments.

Calendar sharing with MSN

MSN Premium also extends calendar sharing beyond what the Internet Free/Busy or exported Web calendar features offer. When you want other people who you aren't sharing your MSN account with to view your appointment availability, you can give them access to your free/busy status or the full appointment details.

When you add these people via the Outlook Connector or MSN interfaces, they are sent an invitation via e-mail, and if they accept they are taken to your public calendar page on MSN. In addition, when you invite MSN members, you can specify on an individual basis whether they can see all the appointment information or just the free/busy details.

Intellisync for MSN

Intellisync for MSN enables you to enter your data only once and keep it up to date inside Outlook and PDAs (Pocket PC or Palm Desktop). One advantage of Intellisync over the Outlook Connector is that it works with all versions of Outlook. It also uses less bandwidth when compared with the MSN Explorer or synching with the Outlook Connector, so it may be a more viable option for dial-up users.

As with the Connector, you can synchronize your contacts, appointments, tasks, and notes with MSN, but it does not synchronize e-mail messages. Aside from this shortcoming, Intellisync excels with the ability to synchronize with ANY of the Outlook folders described above that you already use in your .pst file. You can actually synchronize one MSN Contact folder with multiple Outlook Contact folders (or any supported folder type). However, the Connector manages MSN data in a separate mailbox hierarchy, and if you use any of those folders exclusively, it could cause some confusion managing those in conjunction with the default Outlook folders. For example, the context-sensitive Navigation Pane in Outlook 2003 displays all related folders from all of your loaded e-mail accounts, and the default ones cannot be removed from the choices you see under My Contacts or My Calendars. Using Intellisync will help you keep this information in one folder and prevent you from accidentally mixing up your items stored in related folders.

Intellisync also offers more powerful synchronization control compared with the Connector. You can configure rules for filtering the transfer of information, enable synchronization confirmation notifications, and set how conflicts are handled — all with unique settings for every folder type.

The last drawback you need to be aware of when comparing Intellisync with the Connector is that the synchronization process is entirely manual and not tied to your send/receive events. Remind yourself when you are starting or closing Outlook to initiate a synchronization session to keep your data up to date with MSN.

Intellisync for Yahoo!

If you use Yahoo's free e-mail service, you can also use the Yahoo! branded version of Intellisync to synchronize your information. This version of Intellisync supports all versions of Outlook (although support for Outlook 2003 is still forthcoming) and many versions of the Palm OS, but no support for Pocket PC devices. For more information, see the Address Book section of Yahoo.

Third-party tools

As you've seen, Outlook offers many features and techniques for sharing your information. Using native functionality such as Internet Free/Busy or Web calendars, distributing Outlook items via e-mail, or sharing messages with multiple users using common POP or IMAP accounts, it's easy to get your data to the people who need it. When coupled with advanced services and applications through MSN Premium, and the Outlook Connector and/or Intellisync, you gain near real-time synchronization of data between shared users and the ability to share multiple item types. There are also a wide variety of other free and commercial tools available that provide similar or extended functionality, depending on your unique needs. A great list of these can be seen on the Slipstick Web site.

Happy sharing!

About the author:   Eric Legault, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Outlook since 2003, is the founder of Collaborative Innovations, a Micro-ISV and consulting services provider specializing on Microsoft messaging and collaboration solutions. Eric has more than 13 years experience in the IT industry and has focused on developing solutions based on Microsoft application platforms. He has published articles in MSDN, Office Online, Windows IT Pro magazine, edited books on Outlook, SharePoint and Access, and maintains a blog on Outlook programming and SharePoint technologies. His current focus is on developing custom Outlook add-ins to integrate line of business applications or enhance collaboration processes and workflows. Eric is also the co-founder of the Winnipeg SharePoint User Group and a guest speaker at conferences around the globe.