Ready, Set, Publish! Internet Calendaring in Outlook 2007

Internet Calendar Publishing in Outlook 2007

I talked about Internet Calendar Subscriptions in Outlook 2007 in an earlier post. I would now like to talk a bit about actually publishing Internet Calendars. Internet Calendar Publishing in Outlook gives users the ability to publish personally-created Outlook calendars on the Internet, and start sharing them with others.

Publishing a calendar to Office Online

All you need to start publishing calendars to Office Online is a Windows Live ID (formerly Passport) account and your copy of Outlook 2007, and you are ready to go!

1. Right-click on the calendar you want to publish

a. Clicking “Publish My Calendar…” on the Navigation Pane will publish your default calendar.

2. Click Publish to Internet -> Publish to Office Online 

a. If you are publishing for the first time, you will be prompted to register for Office Online using a Windows Live ID.

3. Specify how you want to publish the calendar on the “Publishing Options” dialog.

a. Detail: You can choose among three levels of detail:

Availability Only: Will show information as Free/Busy/Tentative/Out Of Office
Limited Details: Will show the availability and subjects of calendar items
Full Details: Will show full details of the calendar items

b. Time Span: You can publish the whole calendar for non-default calendars, or choose a date range for publishing for any calendar.

c. Permissions: 

Unrestricted Access: You can choose to publish publicly, which enables anyone who knows the calendar address to subscribe to it.
Restricted Access: Publishing a restricted calendar lets you decide who will have access to it by sending out Sharing Messages to the users who will have access to the calendar with Windows Live ID accounts. 

d. Upload method: 

Automatic Uploads automatically pushes the changes on the publisher’s machine to the servers, updating the calendar on the server when the local copy changes. This works great with Internet Calendar Subscriptions, where the changes automatically trickle down to the subscribers.
Single Upload is useful when you know that the calendar information is static, and does not update as changes happen on the publisher’s side. 

4. Clicking OK publishes the calendar to Office Online.

After this step, you can send Sharing Messages to the users that you want to share your calendar with. For restricted calendars, this is a necessary step to grant access to others. I will be talking about Sharing Messages on a later post in more detail.

Publishing a calendar to a Custom Server

For users who run their own servers, Outlook 2007 enables publishing to custom servers running WebDAV in addition to the Office Online solution. Users who choose this option can still benefit from Outlook’s rich Internet Calendaring features by setting up an internal server and arranging permissions on the server so that only the authorized persons can subscribe to the published calendar.