Tips for Offline Users (2) - Free/busy Time

Publishing free/busy time

Before you leave your office and head out to a client site, or just going offline, you might want to consider publishing your free/busy time schedule first. For Microsoft Exchange users, when someone schedules a meeting with you, he or she can see your free/busy times by default. For others, you may want to consider publishing your scheudule to a shared location on the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service. (For more information, check out http://freebusy.office.microsoft.com/freebusy/freebusy.dll) Alternatively, you may also publish your schedule information on an Internet or Intranet site. For details, click here

You may limit others' access to your calendar within the Microsoft Office Internet Free/Busy Service, and regardless of access level, they will not be able to see the details of your appointments.

For Outlook XP users, you may also publish your calendar as a web page. However, the information published is not updated dynamically as you update your calendar. With this method, others may also see the details of your appointments. For more information on how to set this up, click here

Problematic Offline Folder

A program to scan and fix your damaged offline folder (.ost file) is installed along with Outlook. This program is called scanost.exe. Its location is not too intuitive and is usually not under your default path so it won't run if you just type scanost into Run... or in the command prompt. You can perform a search, or simply go to drive:\program files\common files\system\mapi\1033\scanost.exe. Scanost will compare your .ost file against your mailbox on the Exchange Server and try to fix any difference it finds. If there is anything it can't fix, it will be noted in the scan log so you can manual resolve the problem.