Infoware - MasterCal Calendar tool for managing appointments for large groups of people

What it does ...

MasterCal provides an efficient way of managing appointments for large groups of people.

Organize Groups in Outlook
MasterCal lets you collect a group of people together through a public calendar folder in Outlook. You can include individuals or entire distribution lists in the public folder. Any valid address in your internal e-mail system can be included.

Create appointments for everyone
Appointments made in the public folder are automatically included in everyone's personal calendar. If appointments are updated or removed, everyone's personal calendar is automatically updated accordingly. If the organizer chooses, courtesy messages can be sent to attendees informing them of new and changed appointments; however no response to these messages is necessary for the MasterCal system to work.

Reduce Outlook notification messages
If a regular Outlook appointment were made for the group, then before the appointment could be confirmed in everyone's calendar, dozens of notification and acknowledgement messages would need to be sent back and forth between the organizer of the appointment and the attendees. With the MasterCal system, appointments in the public calendar are automatically added to everyone's personal calendar, without any need for responses to come back to the organizer.

How it works ...

Integration with Outlook and Exchange
The MasterCal system leverages the public folder capabilities of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange server. Using a public calendar folder, MasterCal can keep track of appointments there on behalf of a whole group of people. Individuals and distribution lists are made "attendees" of the public calendar folder. MasterCal ensures their personal calendars include all the information in the public calendar. Multiple public folders can be monitored, each with their own list of attendees.

Centralized control of appointments
Attendees do not have to add, change or delete appointment themselves. All manipulation is handled by the MasterCal System and is invisible to the Attendees. One person simply needs to add appointments to the public folder. The appointments are then propagated throughout the attendees' personal calendars, without them having to accept or acknowledge the appointments. Each individual then sees the MasterCal appointments alongside other appointments they have made on their own.

Select Attendees on a per Item basis
MasterCal allows Administrators to select and process a 'one-off' list of Attendees for each individual MasterCal appointment. Simply select the MasterCal Tab on the Appointment form and display your Firm's Global Address List to select Attendees.

Setting Attendees on an item will over-ride the Calendar folder's default Attendees list - only the Attendees listed on the MasterCal form will receive updates for this Appointment. If an Attendee is removed from this list then MasterCal will delete the appointment from this Attendee's Calendar while still pushing updates for the current appointment to the remaining/new Attendees in the list.

If you do not set Attendees on the Appointment item itself then MasterCal will use the default Attendees list in the Calendar folder's Description field.

Automatic updates in the background
Every time a new appointment is added, or an appointment is changed or deleted, the organizer will be prompted to send an immediate notification to the folder's attendees. The notification would include the item's subject, date and whether it is new, modified or deleted. However, this message is just a courtesy. The actual change to everyone's personal calendar folder occurs only when a scheduled process on the Exchange server executes, transparent to the attendees. As a background server process, this update procedure does not rely on any individual's computer being on or configured correctly, nor does it use up many system resources.

Pricing and Compatibility
MasterCal is compatible with Outlook 98 to 2003, but anyone making appointments in the public folder requires at least Outlook 2000.
Pricing is $10.00 US per mailbox updated plus $250.00 US for backend server. Download - 4MB

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 depends on the size of the organization.

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