OL98: (IMO) Using Outlook's Internet Free/Busy Feature

ID: Q180199

The information in this article applies to:
NOTE: These procedures only apply if you have installed Outlook with the Internet Mail Only option. To determine your installation type, on the Help menu click About Microsoft Outlook. In About Microsoft Outlook you should see "Internet Mail Only" if you have the Internet Mail Only option installed.

SUMMARY

Internet Free/Busy (IFB) is a new feature introduced in Microsoft Outlook 98, for Internet Mail Only (IMO) users. IMO users can now see when others are free or busy and thus more efficiently schedule meetings. IMO users have the option to publish their free/busy information to a user-specified Uniform Resource Locator (URL) file server. One can share this URL file server with all users or limit it to a specific set of users.

An Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard called iCal, is the basis for IFB. IFB uses a part of the iCal standard called iCalendar, an emerging standard for the format and storage of schedule information. iCalendar defines a structure for representing free-busy information in a standardized way.

This article discusses:


MORE INFORMATION

Note: Before you can publish your Free/Busy information to the Internet, you must have installed the Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 Web Publishing Wizard add-on component. For detail on installing this add-on, see the REFERENCES section, below.

Publishing Free/Busy Information to the Internet

Follow these steps to publish your Free/Busy information on the Internet so others can see your availability for meetings and appointments:

  1. On the Tools menu, click Options.


  2. On the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options.


  3. Click Free/Busy Options.


  4. Click to select "Publish my free/busy information."


  5. In "Publish at this URL:" type the fully qualified path to the server on which your Free/Busy information is to be published.

    For example:
    ftp://Myserver/Freebusy/Myname.vfb
    (Free/Busy files have an extension of .vfb)

    NOTE: For servers with Anonymous Login disabled for FTP, users must use the following URL format to allow login when publishing:
    ftp://User:Password@ftp.Myserver.com/Usersfolder/Freebusy/Myname.vfb
    where User is the username of the account and Password is the password associated with the account.


  6. Click OK, OK, and OK to close all dialog boxes.


Viewing Other People's Free/Busy Information on the Internet

You can view the Free/Busy information for any of your Contacts who publish this data on the Internet. If all of your Contacts store this information on the same Free/Busy server, you can set the search path for this information for all contacts. If the location of this information varies by contact, you can set the search path specifically for each contact.

To Set the Default Free/Busy Search Path for all Contacts

  1. On the Tools menu, click Options.


  2. On the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options.


  3. Click Free/Busy Options.


  4. Click to select "Publish my free/busy information."


  5. In "Search at this URL:" type the fully qualified path to the location you would like to search for Free/Busy information.

    NOTE: Outlook supports %NAME% and %SERVER% substitutions.

    For example:
    ftp://%SERVER%/Freebusy/%NAME%.vfb
    NOTE: In this example, Outlook will replace %NAME% with all the characters before the @ symbol and replace %SERVER% with all the characters following the @ symbol in the SMTP address of the one to whom you are sending a meeting request.


  6. Click OK, OK, and OK to close all dialog boxes.


Setting the Free/Busy Search Path for a Specific Contact

  1. In the Contacts folder, double-click to open a Contact.


  2. Click the Details tab. In "Internet Free-Busy Address," type the fully qualified path to the location you would like to search for this Contact's free/busy information. For example: ftp://Contactserver/Freebusy/Contactname.vfb


Internet Free/Busy information is displayed on the Attendee Availability tab of Appointments and Meetings.

To Plan a Meeting

  1. In the Calendar folder, on the Actions menu, click New Meeting Request.


  2. On the Attendee Availability tab, type the name of each attendee in the All Attendees list.


Outlook follows the URL path (as specified above) for the individuals you invite and automatically inserts their free/busy information in the planner.

NOTE: By default, Outlook publishes and retrieves Free/Busy information every 15 minutes. You can manually override this time increment by pointing to Send And Receive on the Tools menu and then clicking Free/Busy Information. This updates the Free/Busy information immediately.


REFERENCES

IMPORTANT: Before you can publish your Free/Busy information to the Internet, you must have installed the Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 Web Publishing Wizard add-on component and carefully followed the steps in the following articles to establish the URL file server.

For information about how to add the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard component in Internet Explorer 4.0, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q171229 How to Add and Remove Internet Explorer Components
For information about posting data to a web server using the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q172769 How to Post Web Content to a Web Server

Additional query words: 


Keywords          : kbdta IntPubWiz GnlCal IntpWeb 
Version           : WINDOWS:
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbhowto

Last Reviewed: July 27, 1999