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How to Access a Colleague's Calendar Using OWA
You can share your calendar without Outlook, fax, stone knives, or bear claws.
by Ben Schorr and Jim McBee
Posted May 25, 2004
Q:
We have an Exchange 2003 server running Outlook Web Access (OWA), and I need to access one of my colleague's calendars. I have permissions to it and open it all the time with Outlook 2003. How can I get to it with OWA?
—Holly, Louisville, Ky.
A:
Ben: My first instinct was to say "You can't. Have the colleague print it and fax it to you." But then Jim had a clever idea.
Jim: If you have permissions to his or her calendar, you should be able to access it through OWA by using a Web address like this: http://your-owa-server/exchange/their-name/calendar.
Ben: See, I told you he was clever. The fax idea was pretty clever too, though, wasn't it?
Jim: No.
Q:
I have to deploy about 100 Outlook 2003 clients all at once, and I was hoping there was some way to automate creating the profiles for those clients. Any suggestions?
—Billy, Buffalo, N.Y.
A:
Jim: There are third-party tools that can automate that for you. One is called Outlook Profiler and another is Profile Maker (see Resources).
Ben: It works for earlier versions of Outlook too. You can set a lot of the options in an Outlook profile ahead of time, such as "empty deleted items upon exit" or "enable offline folders."
Jim: You could put it in a network share location and have it started from a login script. That's a pretty quick and easy way to get your profiles started.
Q:
We're still running an Exchange 5.5 server (I know, we're dinosaurs!), but our new PCs are coming with Office 2003 (and Outlook 2003) preinstalled. Is that going to work or am I going to have to take Outlook 2003 off those machines and go back to Outlook 2000?
—John, Roanoke, Va.
A:
Jim: Never fear John, Outlook 2003 doesn't mind Exchange 5.5 at all.
Ben: That's true, I ran Outlook 2003 against an Exchange 5.5 server for months with no ill effects. There are a few Outlook 2003 features that aren't available with Exchange 5.5 on the backend, but nothing crippling. They are mostly things like drizzle-mode synchronization for cached mode. That's where the headers get synchronized first, then the bodies. It's nice, but not essential, and only available if you have an Exchange 2003 server on the backend.
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