OL2000: (IMO) How to Use the Internet Free/Busy Feature

ID: Q196484

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Outlook 2000

NOTE: These procedures only apply if you have installed Outlook with the Internet Mail Only option. To determine your installation type, on the Help menu click About Microsoft Outlook. In About Microsoft Outlook you should see "Internet Mail Only" if you have the Internet Mail Only option installed.

SUMMARY

Internet Free/Busy (IFB) is a feature of Microsoft Outlook that allows users to see when others are free or busy and thus to more efficiently schedule meetings. Internet Mail Only (IMO) users have the option to publish their free/busy information to a user-specified Uniform Resource Locator (URL) file server. One can share this URL file server with all users or limit it to a specific set of users.

An Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard called iCal, is the basis for IFB. IFB uses a part of the iCal standard called iCalendar, an emerging standard for the format and storage of schedule information. iCalendar defines a structure for representing free-busy information in a standardized way.

This article discusses:

Publishing Free/Busy Information to the Internet

Viewing Other People's Free/Busy Information on the Internet

Setting the Global Free/Busy Search Path for All Contacts

Setting the Free/Busy Search Path for a Specific Contact

Planning a Meeting Using Internet Free/Busy Information

MORE INFORMATION

Note: Before you can publish your Free/Busy information to the Internet, you must install the Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 Web Publishing Wizard add-on component. For details on installing this add-on, see the "References" section in this article.

Publishing Free/Busy Information to the Internet

Follow these steps to publish your Free/Busy information on the Internet so that others can see your availability for meetings and appointments:

On the Tools menu, click Options.

On the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options.

Click Free/Busy Options.

Click to select "Publish my free/busy information."

In "Publish at this URL," type the fully qualified path to the server on which your Free/Busy information is to be published. You can use any valid URL format, such as: "http://...", "file://\\...", or "ftp://..." For example:

ftp://Myserver/Freebusy/Myname.vfb
Free/Busy files have an extension of .vfb

Note: For servers with Anonymous Login disabled for FTP, users must use the following URL format to allow login when publishing:

ftp://<User>:<Password>@ftp.domain.com/Usersfolder/Freebusy/Myname.vfb

where <User> is the username of the account and <Password> is the password associated with the account.

Click OK, OK, and OK to close all dialog boxes.

Viewing Other People's Free/Busy Information on the Internet

You can view the Free/Busy information for any of your Contacts who publish this data on the Internet. If all of your Contacts store this information on the same Free/Busy server, you can set the search path for this information globally for all contacts. Or, if the location of this information varies by contact, you can set the search path specifically for each contact.

Setting the Global Free/Busy Search Path for All Contacts

On the Tools menu, click Options.

On the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options.

Click Free/Busy Options.

Click to select "Publish my free/busy information."

In "Search at this URL" type the fully qualified path to the location you would like to search for Free/Busy information. You can use any valid URL format, such as: "http://...", "file://\\...", or "ftp://..."

Outlook supports %NAME% and %SERVER% substitutions.

For example:

"ftp://%SERVER%/Freebusy/%NAME%.vfb" (without the quotation marks)

In an SMTP address, Outlook will replace %NAME% with all the characters before the at (@) symbol and replace %SERVER% with all the characters following the @ symbol.

Click OK, OK, and OK to close all dialog boxes.

Setting the Free/Busy Search Path for a Specific Contact

In the Contacts folder, double-click to open a Contact.

Click the Details tab. In "Internet Free-Busy Address," type the fully qualified path to the location you would like to search for this Contact's free/busy information. You can use any valid URL format, such as: "http://...", "file://\\...", or "ftp://..."

For example:

"ftp://Contactserver/Freebusy/Contactname.vfb" (without the quotation marks)

Internet Free/Busy information is displayed on the Attendee Availability tab of Appointments and Meetings.

Planning a Meeting Using Internet Free/Busy Information

In the Calendar folder, on the Actions menu, click New Meeting Request.

On the Attendee Availability tab, type the name of each attendee in the All Attendees list.

Outlook follows the URL path (as specified above) for the individuals you invite and automatically inserts their free/busy information in the planner.

Outlook publishes and retrieves Free/Busy information every 15 minutes by default. You can manually override this time increment by pointing to Send And Receive on the Tools menu and then clicking Free/Busy Information. This updates the Free/Busy information immediately.

REFERENCES

Before you can publish your Free/Busy information to the Internet, you must have installed the Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 Web Publishing Wizard add-on component and carefully followed the steps in the following articles to establish the URL file server.

For information about how to add the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard component in Internet Explorer 5.0, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q171229 How to Add and Remove Internet Explorer Components

For additional information about posting data to a web server using the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard, please see the following article(s) in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q172769 How to Post Web Content to a Web Server

Additional query words: OL2K

Keywords : kbdta IntPubWiz StpHowto IntpWeb
Version : WINDOWS:2000
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbhowto