Understanding What Status Is Available in VB.NET

Drawer QR Code ISO/IEC18004 in VB.NET Understanding What Status Is Available

Exchange Server provides four free/busy states for a given time period: Free, Busy, Tentative, and Out of Office. The Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service, however, only provides status as Busy or Unknown. Therefore, if you view someone s free/busy information that is published to the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service, all time the user has marked as Tentative or Out of Office appears as Busy when you view his or her schedule in Outlook or from the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Web site. This same behavior holds true when you post your free/busy information from Outlook to FTP, HTTP, or file URL, as explained in the following section. Therefore, the only way to see Tentative and Out of Office status is to pull that information directly from Exchange Server.

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Prevent free/busy publishing You can avoid publishing your free/busy information to any servers if you prefer. Choose Tools, Options and click Calendar Options. Then click Free/Busy Options. You can set the Publish n Months Of Calendar Free/Busy Information On The Server option to specify how much of your free/busy information is published. By setting this value to 0, no free/busy information is published, and your free/busy information will appear blank to other users.

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The Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service is a central place on the Internet where you can publish your schedule. Publishing your schedule allows anyone (or only those you specify) to access your free/busy information from anywhere on the Internet. This free Microsoft service is useful if you don t use Exchange Server but still want to share your free/busy information with others, whether inside or outside of your company. You can also use Microsoft s service in conjunction with Exchange Server, publishing your free/busy information to the service to allow users outside of your Exchange Server organization to view schedule status.

Viewing free/busy data from an Outlook profile The current iteration of the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service apparently has prob lems with free/busy data published from an Outlook profile that contains an Exchange Server account. Although others can see the information from Outlook, they will not be able to view it from Microsoft s Web interface to the Free/Busy Service (which is rather limited anyway). Free/busy data published from an Outlook profile without an Exchange Server account is visible from both Outlook and the Web interface.

The following sections explain how to publish to the different types of free/busy servers. Later in this chapter you also learn how to set up your own free/busy server.

To publish the schedule of your free/busy times using the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service, follow these steps:

open the Free/Busy Options dialog box (see Figure 19-36).

Figure 19-36. Configure the free/busy options and the location for publishing free/busy information.

the default) and how often the free/busy information should be updated on the server (every 15 minutes is the default).

the service. Figure 19-37 shows the sign-in page for the Microsoft Office Internet Free/ Busy Service.

Figure 19-37. To use the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service, you must sign in using a Microsoft Passport login.

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Fill out the form, including the e-mail address you are using with Outlook, and click Sign Up. You can then continue to the Free/Busy Service. After you sign up, the service tells you how to configure Outlook for use.

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free/busy information by typing their e-mail addresses. Or select the All Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service Members check box to allow all users to see your information.

Figure 19-38. Specify the users who are allowed to access your free/busy infor mation or select the check box to allow all users access.

Service. (The service sends an e-mail to all users who are not members of the service to notify them that they can view your free/busy information and to invite them to join the service.)

8 Click OK to save your changes. 9 Continue clicking OK to close the Free/Busy Options, Calendar Options, and Options

dialog boxes. Your free/busy information is now shared using the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service, and other users who have joined the service can see that information.