Sharing request: Calendar
Adonis, 05 Aug 2009 11:22 PM
No, I won’t share my calendar with you…
I seem to often get requests to share my calendar in Outlook. Various people in my company who want to schedule my time with a client or to review an RFP or something believe they need some special access to my calendar. Sometimes I “deny”; many times I just ignore the request. I almost never “Allow.” Eventually I go to the person and show them how to see enough of my calendar to schedule an appointment. This post is for those of you who ask to share my calendar – here’s what you need to know to pick a time for us to meet…
In Outlook, go to your calendar, right-click any day and time and click on “New Meeting Request.”
You’re going to get a standard meeting request email message. Just put my name in the “to” field with anyone else who you need to schedule (from our internal address list) and click the “Scheduling Assistant” button.
In the scheduling assistant panel, you can see times when people are available, when they are out of the office, etc. You can also 
schedule a room (at our company) by clicking on the “Add Rooms…” button on the bottom of that page and selecting several rooms. Find the time that works for the people you need to meet with and find the room that has the availability you want. Delete the rooms you don’t need and then hit the “Appointment” button to go back and add an agenda and a call-in number or whatever.
See, you don’t need to share my calendar to find my availability. Denied!
Ryhow says:
05 Aug 2009 at 11:53 PMWell said, Ado!
Terri Morton says:
06 Aug 2009 at 9:47 AMI figure that what I do during company time is the company's business, so I typically share my calendar with everyone. For doctor's appointments or sensitive meetings, these can be marked a private so that they are not publicly viewable and appear as "Private Appointment".
I guess it all depends upon your role in the company. In a sales role I might not want to be so open. In a PM role, there's no real reason for secrecy.
Adonis says:
06 Aug 2009 at 3:38 PMI hear ya, Terri. I just don't want to have to remember to mark my personal stuff as private. I only want one calendar so I like to add things to my calendar like my softball games and kid's birthday parties and my wife's doctor appointments. I also have business trips and meetings. In general, there's really no reason for random marketing person to have access to all of my calendar details just to schedule a meeting - that's what the meeting assistant is for, imo. We'll see!