Meeting scheduling with public folder calendars

[jeffrhysjones]

I have a simple (I hope) question about group scheduling using SWA and public folders.

I created a public folder calendar, and in this I created a meeting event, as the creator, I see my name on the list of attendees. I then type in the name of a test account I want to invite to attend. I set the time, stick some test text in and save it. So far it all looks fine.

The problem is that - for some reason, even though I was the creator - the event does not appear in my own calendar - but as the meeting request is sent off to the test user and accepted - this user gets the meeting in their own local calendar.

Also - only the test users free / busy information shows up when I try to book a new event with the same two people.

Is there something special you have to do to enable proper scheduling and free/busy data when using shared folder calendars? We need to have some form of central place to see and manage peoples time.

The funny thing is that we have the same problem with our existing exchange server public folder - but you can get around it by adding yourself again as an invitee - which is just annoying. This workaround doesn't seem to work with Scalix.

Jeff

[jlecomte]

Jeff,

These are all very interesting questions.

If you create a meeting in a public folder (given you have the necessary permissions of course), it will stay in that public folder. I don't see any reason why that meeting should be moved to your personal calendar.

When the attendee receives the meeting invitation, SWA will create the corresponding meeting in the attendee's default personal calendar. Indeed:

1) the attendee may not have the necessary permissions to create an item in the corresponding public folder.
2) SWA will not be able to know which public folder actually contains the original meeting (only personal calendars are loaded at startup)
3) you would get several meeting items at the same time in the public folder (1 for the organizer, 1 for each attendee), which would be even more confusing.

The local Free/Busy service publishes Free/Busy information only for your default personal calendar. In the future, we may let the user define which other personal calendar (in addition to the default one) should be published.

Outlook against Scalix, Outlook against Exchange and Scalix Web Access all behave exactly the same to that regard.

The workaround you mentioned at the end won't work using Scalix Web Access because one given person can only be present once in the recipient list of a meeting.

Julien

[jeffrhysjones]

Thanks for the reply!

You know - the reasoning behind this requirement is simply that of being able to present a shared place where people with permissions can see / manage events for the entire company as whole at a glance.

I understand the issues with permissions - and if it was possible for the SWA client to allow delegation - then essentially if everyone could view each others calendars, then this would enable me to see who was doing what. But I would have to check in 10 places!

It's important that a solution must revolve around personal calendars, because users like to sync these with their PDAs etc - this I know.

So - the 'Killer' feature which I think I am looking for is this:

To create a new type of 'Calendar' which was effectively a amalgamation of everyones (or a select group) personal calendars. This 'Uber Cal' shows those with the correct permissions their own events, next to everyone else's. When posting an event in your personal calendar, you would have some sort of 'private' tickbox which would prevent it being shown by the uber cal.

This would do it for us - all the syncing and free / busy flexibility of personal cals, with the added ability to get a general overview of everyones meetings side by side, in one shared place.

Is this a dumb idea?

Jeff

[florian]

Jeff,

first of all, there are no dumb ideas when it comes to functionality and software; in theory, everything is possible and if one has a serious use case, there is probably good reason for it.

Also, one should not do things in a way because things have been done that way for a long time. As technologies evolve, there might be better solutions for the same problem or even totally new problems as business changes around.

SWA itself is the perfect example; a fully-browser based client with such rich functionality and look&feel seemed impossible quite a few years ago. Already, a number of our customers prefer to use SWA over Outlook, because it's more lightweight, easy to use and location-independent. Thanks, btw., to Julien who is a senior software developer on our SWA team, for answering here and talking through the details of this.

Delegation for SWA is a widely-requested feature and the SWA team is working hard to make this happen in one of the next releases; also, we have quite a few new ideas about calendaring that will surface as time progresses. The next major release of Scalix and SWA, scheduled for Q1/06, will already provide a number of improvements to the overall calendaring experience.

Stay tuned,
Florian.

[jeffrhysjones]

Thanks again, all of you, for your input on this - and all of my other questions littered about these foums.

My evaluation has been a truly enlightening experience. As technical director of my own software company - Emojo (web CMS) - I know that the secret of good software is to constantly adapt & evolve your product to keep up with (ideally slightly ahead of) consumer 'trends'. Of course part of this is simply listening to customers, but then there is also the danger of chopping and changing too much trying to service the random needs of every customer that demands the most important feature - according to them.

My main expertise is R&D. I have a knack of discovering hot technologies. The Scalix offering is clearly way ahead of everything out there in terms of web client. As a Mac user - I salute you all for delivering such rich functionality. It's not Scoogle. It's not Googlix - I think it's better actually.

If anything, I would say there are too many minor point releases - I'd like to see the next release being 10 - and the one after that 11!

Anyway - the day I will bin my Exchange server along with all the IE based web clients will be a happy one. Hopefully this will be sooner rather than later. Who would question the need to buy in a "New & improved version of Exchange Server"? I just don't need to tell them that it runs on Linux and it's not made by Microsoft.

Jeff