Feature req: display free / busy info in Calander/Planning

[Rienk]

In this case I would like to (only) view other people calanders free / busy information without rights being granted.

When creating an appointment the scheduling tab already shows free / busy information as such it should not be limited by rights/authorisations.

Hope some other people have same feature req.

[jaime.pinto]

It's funny how in practice the ideal becomes impractical.

Showing free / busy information while in the scheduling tab is very fast, since you just inquire a "slice" of the whole timelime calendar for one specific user and a particular week or day.

Now, if you want to show *ALL* calendar entries (hidden or not/ permissions or not) potentially from several users at once, so that you can THEN pick a slot to book, that is a very different scenario. The load placed on the server and network to make that information available to a particular email client can be immense, depending on the number of entries some of the other users may have.

Sure, I'd like to see this enhancement as well, it would go beyond what most centralized enterprise servers offer these days, MS included, but I'm not sure if any of us would have enough patience to wait for the display to upgrade.

I can envision something like this, but would require a complete revamp of the server to do indexing ahead of time for potentially all users in the system, and prepared some sort of a "preview", that the client can display, and you could "zoom-in" for more details, similar to google-maps.

[Rienk]

Hi, Thanks for the reply and you have described the request much better then I did.

Today In practice for a limted number of persons 5, we expect everybody to share its calander rights. This in order to able to use i.e. "planning view" effectively. We dont mind what personel is exactly doing we just need to know when the are available. There is no such option to grant rights to only show / free busy times.

Would performance indeed be an issue it might be an option that you grant 'rights' to specific group of delagates to view bussy / free times. Instead of view the entire calander text of what people are doing.
In my case some of my personel may see that I am not available. It is not of their concern of what I am doing (that is somewhat confidential, and no that private check box is not what i mean)

[jaime.pinto]

It's possible to get some of what you want in 2 ways using the software in its current state:

1) Public folders: Using Outlook, just click and drag your calendar onto the Public Folders.
If you are not too worried about private entries and you don't have a lot of users, they can all make their individual calendars available to all the others, and you won't have too many calendars to deal with. The can even be displayed side-by-side.

2) If privacy is a concern, you may refine better who to give access to your calendar either by individual mailbox (calendar) folder delegation or folder sharing, just by right clicking on the calendar and working out the permissions properties.