How to Share Your Outlook Calendar Availability Quickly
January 9, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
I found a really cool tip today in my email inbox from Microsoft on their Tips and Tricks Special Delivery.
It’s a very quick way of sharing your availability with someone based on your calendar.
When you’re looking at your calendar in Outlook 2007, there’s a link on the left-hand side labeled "Send a Calendar via E-mail".
Click on this link and you’re then prompted for choosing your calendar you want to share and then the settings of what you want to share as you’ll see below.
You can select a date range like today, tomorrow, 30 days, or custom dates.
You can decide to share "Full Details", "Availability Only" or "Limited Details". As well as deciding how you’d like to format the display of the calendar for the other person.
In the example below I’ve only shared my availability with no details for the next 7 days to the user. What you see below is embedded into an Outlook message that I can quickly send to someone with the information.
In addition it’s also shared as an .ics attachment so they could open it in their calendar as well.
Pretty nifty wouldn’t you say?
This would come in handy in just about any use, but I think would be really great for people running small businesses and managing their time themselves. A quick way to share their calendar and say, "Let me know what works for you and we’ll book it!"
