Custom calendering possibilities?

[sarah.cox]

Hi All,

My Boss wants to see if outlook can accomplish the following:

He wants a calendar in public folders that users can input appointments
into with a custom form. This custom form would have custom drop down
fields, with 'canned' responses. These fields would act similarly to
the 'out of office' labels etc. We'd want to be able to have set
responses to these custom fields (listing the different employees,
business sector we have, that kind of thing).

Then, he wants the ability to pull up this calendar and easily and
simply (this is a boss after all) filter based on the custom fields--so
he would be able to select that only Sue's appts show up, or that only
the events labeled with 'Financial Products' (this is defined in the
custom field) shows up.

After that, he'd want an ability to run a report, with the same
filtering capability. This report would list all the events for a set
time frame, sorted and labeled by user and business venture, etc.

Would anyone know if all of this is feasible? The alternative is having
someone code a vb program or something that 'fakes' an outlook calendar
view (shudder). Or, if there are other solutions, I'd love to hear
about it.

I've looked around outlook getting a feel for it and see I can create
custom forms...I tried to play with creating a form to add appts to a
calendar, but the design interface is a confusing. I also saw some word
type documents with macros that supposedly will 'harvest' your calendar
appointments into a report...is this what I need for the reporting
functions or does outlook have a 'reporting' type of function?

Thanks very much for your help!

-Sarah

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

It's feasible, but it's a lot of work, especially if the users aren't going to be forced to enter appointments both in public folders and in their own Calendar folders.

Outlook has no reporting capability other than printing what you see in its views.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Guest]

Sue, what about a form that auto schedules an appointment (or vacation) in a
public calendar based on field content and creates an Access record or
populates cells in an Excel worksheet using same field content? The problem I
have is tracking staff absences and those hours against their employee
benefits (vacation, sick, etc.).

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

That's possible, too, but again would require some coding. You might want to look at the off-the-shelf calendar consolidation products listed at http://www.slipstick.com/calendar/scheduleall.htm . There's at least one sample application there, too.
--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers