How to create an Outlook shared calendar, the limitations and how to overcome them

1) Viewing multiple employee calendars in Outlook

There are a number of ways multiple calendars can be displayed in Outlook. These vary depending upon the platform and version of Outlook you use, but the three main types of view are:

Split Views show a calendar per person. Week & month views can be cumbersome, a 1 day view for 5 people is helpful as you can quickly see who is available at a set time (blue bars).

The Scheduling View shows employees as rows, which is better for viewing multiple calendars, but is limited to 2 days and loses the subject & appointment type colorization .

How to work around the multiple calendar limitations in Outlook

You can’t change Outlook’s view styles, but you can minimize frustrations. For example, for a team of 15 team members you’d have to use the new calendar check box to select 5 calendars to view from your contact list. You have to click the check box again to deselect them, then choose another 5 members and so on until you’ve seen all calendars. Instead, create a new calendar group for a block of 5 group members,  so instead of selecting and unselecting group members (employees) 15 times, you simply select and unselect 3 calendar groups. It’s a little faster, it’s not perfect, but it does work.

Another limitation is that you can only show time for a shared calendar over a date range of a couple of days. The combination of a limited date range and limited  number of group calendars that can be displayed, severely restricts the amount of calendar information that can be viewed. Timewatch can help overcome these issues with it’s Whitespace for Outlook system:

How Timewatch’s Outlook Scheduling App overcomes Outlook’s multi-calendar limitations

To overcome the limitations in Microsot Outlook, Timewatch’s muti-calendar Outlook view shows as many employee Outlook calendars as you need over as many days as you need.

To the right is an example of a view of 30 Outlook shared calendars over 2 weeks. The view is completely seamless – as new appointments are made in an Outlook personal calendar they are automatically updated in this Outlook group calendar view. The view is dynamic, you can filter employees by skill, tag or attribute, and sort employees by name, availability etc.

2) Appointment types – their uses, limits and how to over come them

Outlook is limited to just 5 appointment types and you cannot rename them or change their color.

How to overcome appointment type limitations in Outlook

With Timewatch you can create as many appointment types (booking types) as you need and you can color code them as you wish, set security levels to control who can use them along with other rules.

3) Using color coding for better resource scheduling

Color coding can help people instantly assimilate an incredible amount of information and is incredibly helpful when people are viewing multiple calendars side-by-side. When you make an appointment in a Microsoft Outlook group calendar, it is colored according to the appointment type.

There are just 5 appointment types in Outlook. They cannot be renamed or their colors changed, which is very limiting and somewhat unusual for Microsoft who are usually very sensitive to the use of colors, particularly given the issues with color blindness. Colors are also used to represent different people’s calendars in multi-calendar views, but again you cannot control the colors used and the colors used for appointments are used for calendars. Categories are more configurable and you can set their color, but you are limited to a fixed color pallete that conflicts with appointment types and multi calendar colorization! Also, categories need to be set for each person and therefore can differ wildly by person. For this reason they are only really usable as a personal calendar tool.

The biggest issue with colorization in Outlook is that there are 3 completely different mechanisms that colorize appointments – appointment types, categories and shared calendars. These all conflict with each other and more often than not cause confusion.

Timewatch Solution: Make color coding more manageable, powerul and helpful

Timewatch’s multi-calendar Outlook view is clear, simple and easy to understand with powerful and fully configurable color coding.

4) Outlook appointment information limits, and overcoming them

The information that can be allocated to an Outlook appointment is very limited. We are often asked to help companies add other information that critical to their business. Information such as: Customer, Project, specialist items related to a company’s industry or the way they work. For example: order numbers, yes/no answers, is catering needed, is setup time required and more. Often the information needed varies by appointment type! Again, Outlook is very limited in this regard.

Some companies resort to using the Location or Notes field to enter such information, but these are not viable solutions as there are data integrity, consistency and security issues.

Timewatch Solution: Allow new fields to be added to Outlook appointments

Timewatch allows important new fields to be created and added to Outlook appointments.

Fields such as customer, project, sub project levels and type of work are very common fields companies ask for.

Sometimes customers need special fields unique to their business, and in some cases fields that change depending upon the type of appointment, the customer or employee allocated. Whatever information is needed on an appointment, these can be added, they are visible in Outlook and are available in reporting.

Timewatch’s advanced booking screen can be as simple as Outlook is, or can have new fields added to suit your organization’s needs.

5) Search employee Outlook calendar availability by date, skill etc.

Imagine out of a team of 20 people you want to find someone to work with a customer for a half day next week.

With Outlook you have to select 5 calendars, go to next week and look at each morning / afternoon. You might get lucky straight away, if not you have to uncheck those 5 calendars and choose 5 more and repeat the process until you find someone. You may need to repeat this many times and you may not find anyone free at all and need to start again looking at a different day!

There is a better way to do this in Outlook, but this has limitations. Timewatch also provides a solution to this need that completely overcomes Outlook’s limitations.

Improving availability searching in Outlook.

Outlook’s ‘Scheduling Assistant’ can help as it allows you to check people’s availability, but you need to know which people to search. This is not at all helpful if everyone is busy or you don’t know the people and their skills. Ideally the search should let you choose from a list of resources that are available on that date as well as specify the skills or the attributes of the person or persons you are looking for.

Timewatch Solution: How to overcome Outlook’s availability search limitations

If you’ve been granted delegate access rights to other people’s calendars, you can create appointments in their calendars, but only in one at a time. If you wanted to book 5 people for a meeting, you have to use the check box to select each person’s calendar, make 5 appointments, one for each person in their  personal calendar. It will take a while, and it’s prone to error as it’s all too easy to choose the wrong calendar, the wrong date or time. You can create one appointment and invite all 5 people, but you are included in the meeting request as the meeting organizer. As the meeting request organizer, the meeting  is in your calendar and cannot be removed without deleting the meeting for everyone. Your diary will soon become full of meetings that you are not involved in.

Outlook is geared toward organizations where people schedule themselves and their own meetings, but if you want schedulers to manage other people’s calendars, this is very difficult in Outlook.

Timewatch Solution: Make bookings for multiple resources from the appointment screen

Outlook manages timezones by person not by the appointment. This can cause issues when making meetings with customers or others outside of your organization. Imagine you have a presentation with a customer this Friday at 10:00am but the customer calls to ask to shift it to Monday. No problem, but there is a daylight savings change in their timezone with the clocks going forwards but there is no change in your timezone. Net result, you miss the presentation..

The Task dialog box allows users to create non diary based entries – time commitments that the user finds the time to do.

Outlook calendar permissions do not allow control at the appointment level. Once someone is granted access to an Outlook calendar, they have access to all appointments in that calendar. If they are allowed to delete items, they can delete any item. There may be impoartant appointments that schedulers do not want employees to be able to create, edit or delete. Effective calendar planning requires a greater level of control over which appointment types people can access and what functions they can perform. Although Outlook does not allow you to change access permissions, Timewatch does.

Timewatch Solution: Enhance Outlook calendar permissions at the appointment level

Outlook allows you to create appointments that conflict with each other. These are shown in Outlook side by side at a reduced width. In some cases overlapping appointments is helpful, perhaps even desired, but having two commitments with two different customers at the same time is a big problem for any organization. This is a serious shortcoming in calendar planning, and one of the most common features customers ask us to help them with.

Timewatch Solution: Enhance Outlook with conflict management and resolution functions

With Timewatch you can control conflicts at an appointment type level. Eg. allow for tentative appointments, disallow for customer work.

In Outlook, calendars are displayed by employee name. This is fine for small businesses where when everyone knows everyone else, but as organization size increases, locating and viewing employee calendars and searching availability becomes harder and harder. Although you can use the create new calendar group  feature to create blocks of Outlook group calendars, it is not a very practical or scalable solution as it needs to be setup manually for each person and is prone to error. As we discussed in point 1 above, to be usable these group calendars are limited to 5 calendars over 1 or 2 days.

Timewatch Solution: Provide scalable views and grouping of employees by skill, office, team etc.

Perhaps the biggest limitation in Outlook is that it has no reporting, so it is impossible to answer even the simplest of questions without spending a lot of time and effort manually trawling through Outlook calendars. Take a look at the following questions and have a think about how long it would take to find out the following from Outlook for a Team of 10 people:

• “What is our productivity by employee, team, office?”
• “Who is scheduled to work with company X next week?”
• “How much time is scheduled for company X next month?”
• “Which are the most utilized resources next week?”
• “Who is free to provide Training to company Y on Friday?”
• “How much time did we spend on customer X last week or month?
• “How much time did we spend on project Y last week or month?
• “How much time did employee Z spend on project Y last week or month?

Any of these would take hours and even in relatively small companies would not be worth the effort.

Timewatch Solution: Provide full, unlimited reporting facilities to organizations that use Outlook

Timewatch provides a full reporting suite on an organization’s employee calendars. We provide a library of standard reports that suit most needs. We also provide report writing and dashboard designer tools for customers to be able to create the exact reporting they need.