Group Calendars in Outlook - Infoware Exchange Solutions

Maintaining Group Calendars in Outlook
Infoware's MasterCal Calendar Tool

Do you schedule the same Outlook appointments for large groups of individuals?

Need to make mass event changes to everyone's Calendar in Outlook?

Need to synchronize Public calendar items to individuals' PDAs?

Infoware's MasterCal software allows for the centralized administration of calendar appointment and events. Monitoring one or more Public Folder calendars, MasterCal will push appointments and events out to a group of private mailboxes. Attendees will not have to add, change or delete these items themselves as all manipulation is handled by the MasterCal System and is invisible to the Attendees - there are no meeting requests!

Our clients have used MasterCal to:

Schedule group meetings
Support Blackberry and PDA users
Notify staff members of birthdays and holidays
Add calendar entries so team members know availability of co-workers
Book and track business resources

How it Works

Each calendar monitored by MasterCal has a group or list of 'Attendees' associated with it. An Attendees list can consist of individuals, groups (Distribution Lists from your Firm's Global Address List) or a combination of both. MasterCal also supports nested Distribution Lists (lists within lists). The monitored folders are stored on your firm's Exchange Server, but the system is maintained from an administrator's workstation using Microsoft Outlook. Items can be added, changed or deleted from the public folder using a custom Outlook form and a custom COM Add-in.

The Attendees list used by our group calendar tool is stored in the public folder's Description field. To view the Description field, administrators navigate to the public folder in question, right-click on it and select 'Properties' and select the 'General' tab of the Properties dialog.

Group Calendar interface

The calendars monitored by the MasterCal custom form look and behave identically to a standard Outlook Appointment. The updates to the Attendee calendars are scheduled to run as an event on the Exchange Server. Each time a calendar items is added, changed or deleted items, the adminstrator will be prompted to send an immediate notification of the action to the folder's Attendees. Updates to Attendee's Calendars are logged and applied each time the Backend MasterCal Server is scheduled to run.

Use MasterCal and Stay Connected!

MasterCal is a powerful tool for to reduce the overhead for managing large numbers of Outlook calendars. For firms that have numerous Blackberrys or PDAs, the use of MasterCal is a great work-around to allow for the synchronization of multiple calendars.

Administrative Option: MasterCal Scrubber
For large organizations, the management of private calendars can be quite cumbersome. If your organization has a high employee turnover rate or changing employee roles, you might find the MasterCal Scrubber an essential tool.

The MasterCal Scrubber tool is a maintenance program designed to perform bulk changes to the Calendars of the 'Attendees' of all of the 'Published' MasterCal Calendar folders. The MasterCal server administrator can force all appointments to be removed and recreated in the Attendees Calendars. The server administrator can also force the push of all current entries in the published calendars to a new attendee that has been added to the calendar. The MasterCal Scrubber tool is available as an additional cost item. Price is based on the number of mailboxes in the organization.

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