search.subscribe.share in outlook 2007 : Sharing

Ready, Set, Publish! Internet Calendaring in Outlook 2007

michaelaffronti — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 23:44:00 GMT

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.

Internet Calendaring: Q&A time...

michaelaffronti — Fri, 19 May 2006 06:00:00 GMT

There were some great questions in the comments to my previous post about Internet Calendar Subscriptions in Outlook 2007. I wanted to answer those before I go on to talk about Internet Calendar Publishing in Outlook 2007. - Can

"However, the downloaded calendar will not be updated automatically when the original calendar is changed." So how do they get updated?

Internet Calendars that are ‘subscribed to’ via the webcal:// protocol will get updated automatically. The webcal:// handler on the URL tells Outlook to establish a dynamic link with the calendar that lets us check for changes at each update interval. Downloaded, or imported calendars, are static and will not receive updates. That operation is a one-time only import.

Can you compare and contrast the functionality offered here vs. that of Outlook Calendar Sharing in an Exchange Environment?

Within a corporation or any Exchange Environment, Exchange sharing is still the best way of sharing calendars and other Outlook data. For instance, Exchange calendar sharing can have “read/write” access for the subscribers, whereas Internet Calendar Subscriptions are always read-only. When sharing through Exchange, you will need a connection to your server (possibly inside your corporation’s intranet) to stay up to date with any shared calendars. Internet-based calendars can be accessed whenever Outlook has regular Internet access, and does not require Exchange connectivity.

Willthis work for Free/Busy information (i.e., is it shown when you go to schedule an appointment with someone).

Yes. It’s a great way of scheduling with someone who is outside of your coporation’s Exchange environment. For scheduling amongst people in the same environment, free/busy information through Exchange is still the best way to go.

What scenarios do you see this primarily used in?

If you’re a sports fan, you can easily subscribe to an Internet Calendar version of your favorite team’s schedule. This would allow you to see all of the upcoming games and even overlay that calendar on top of your own – now find out exactly where and when you’ll be able to catch a game. If the team changes location and/or time for a game, as often happens in the playoffs, any schedule change will be automatically sunk down to Outlook. For projects, it offers an easy way for the coordinator to create a group calendar that is accessible by all members of the team.

The personal space has some awesome applications of Internet Calendaring that become accessible with our calendar publishing functionality. Look forward to a blog post about that soon.

Have you looked at using RSS as a transport mechanism for this information? I think there is a service called rsscalendar.com that does this. RSS to me seams like a natural way to syndicate this calendar information. If you have looked at it, what was the decision to not go in the RSS direction?

Outlook 2007 will not support using RSS as a calendar transport protocol. It is a compelling use of the RSS format and we are investigating its integration in a future release of Outlook.

What will be the link (if any) to Outlook Web Access? I guess what I am trying to ask is if calendars added to outlook will be accessible in Outlook Web Access?

Subscribed Internet Calendars are local to your machine, however, the information we use to subscribe to the calendars roams through Exchange. This means that on each machine that you connect to Exchange you will be able to see the Internet Calendars after they have been download onto that machine’s local store. However, they are not available through OWA since they need to be downloaded to your local store.

Would Microsoft provide tools and code samples for developing with the webcal protocol?

The webcal protocol is just a derivative of the http protocol, which enables the browser to hand the Internet Calendar address correctly to any registered iCal client. Thus generating a webcal address is trivial once you have the http address for the *.ics file. For generating ical content, users can choose to save their calendar as iCal (*.ics) or publish their calendar directly in Outlook and share their calendar, as I will outline in my next post.

Thank you for your interest and questions. I’ll be talking about Internet Calendar Publishing in Outlook 2007 in my next post, and until that time, let us know if you have any other comments and questions about Internet Calendaring…

Internet Calendar Subscriptions - Part 1

michaelaffronti — Thu, 11 May 2006 02:35:00 GMT

This post is coming to you courtesy of Can Comertoglu, our Outlook PM in charge of our Internet Calendaring experience. The new Internet Calendar functionality falls under the Sharing experience for Outlook 2007, so I've asked Can to take a few posts and discuss it with all of you here on the Search.Subscribe.Search blog. I encourage everyone to ask questions at the end of each post; we'll aggregate them together and do another Q&A soon.

Can, take it away...

Outlook 2007 introduces Internet Calendar Subscriptions, the ability to download Internet Calendars (.ics files) into Outlook and receive updates to the calendar content automatically. While Internet Calendars can be downloaded into Outlook without the subscription functionality, the dynamic nature of the subscription-based calendars makes them a compelling solution for online content providers to provide rich content to their users.

When an Internet Calendar is downloaded using the subscription functionality, the calendar is read-only and bound to the original Internet Calendar on the server. This dynamic binding allows updates to be received by the client every time the original calendar changes. Internet Calendars that are downloaded into Outlook without the subscription functionality are not ready-only and can be modified in Outlook. However, the downloaded calendar will not be updated automatically when the original calendar is changed.

Subscription-based Internet Calendars use the WebCal protocol (webcal://), which is a derivative of the http:// protocol and is used to create the subscription binding.

Internet calendars can be brought into Outlook for subscription in three ways:

Clicking a “webcal://” link in a web browser: When you click on a webcal:// link, Outlook displays the confirmation dialog box as below, and clicking yes creates the subscription binding. This is the easiest way to subscribe to calendars found in online Internet Calendar Directories such as www.icalshare.com.
Subscribing via Outlook Account Manager: The alternative option is to create the binding manually by going into Account Manager in Outlook (Tools->Account Settings) and switching to Internet Calendars tab as shown in the picture below. Here you can both change the settings on existing subscriptions, and add new subscriptions by clicking “New”. Once you enter the calendar address in the dialog box, Outlook will create the subscription binding.
Subscribing via a Sharing Message from another Outlook user: In subsequent posts, I will be talking about publishing Internet Calendars from Outlook 2007. After publishing calendars, users can send Sharing Messages to the users that they would like to share their calendar with. Recipients can subscribe to those published calendars from within Outlook, creating a seamless publishing/subscribing experience.

Gettin' crafty with reading RSS feeds

michaelaffronti — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:18:00 GMT

There are several cool ways you leverage Outlook's folder management and search infrastructure to improve the way you view RSS feeds inside the application. They range from the simple, like creating subfolders, to the complex, like using search folders to find key terms. Here's a look at some of the ways I use these techniques to read my RSS feeds in Outlook...

Folder Management

The simplest thing you can do is use Outlook's standard folder management to organize your feeds by criteria you choose. Here, I have added a few organizational folders for my feeds to group them by type:

This lets me easily group the numerous feeds I can be subscribed to at any one point in time.

Search Folders

Outlook 12 ships with a powerful new Search platform for explicit queries that is also used for Search Folders. You can now perform powerful searches on RSS feeds using the Full Text Engine and easily monitor thousands of feed items for specific keywords.

I subscribe to approximatley one hundred feeds in my default Outlook profile, and there is obviously no way to read all of the new items during the course of a day. What I've done is create two Search Folders to help me out:

Search Folder 1: "Today's News"
This Search Folder queries all of my feeds and displays just the new, unread posts from today. Whenever I have a few spare minutes I love to go in this folder and just read the news from my favorite blogs and ezines. As I read an article the item disappears out of the search folder since it's read/unread status automatically changes to unread.

To create this search folder, it's a simple setup using our Search Folder criteria selector:

When you view the Search Folder, the best part is being able to group by folder, as I then get a really easy roll-up view to view today's RSS items:

Search Folder 2: "RSS Watcher"
I subscribe to lots of RSS feeds from sites that can potentially be discussing Microsoft Office, my product Outlook, or any of several topics that I consider really important (search technologies, RSS, tagging, etc.). Instead of having to wade through all of them, or even do explicit searches inside of each feed's folder, I have a Search Folder that I call my "RSS Watcher".

This Search Folder goes over all of the feeds that I'm subscribed to, and only pulls the unread items out that have certain keywords in them:

Which results in a nice roll-up view that I then sort-by folder:

Hope those provide some interesting ways to think about how RSS aggregation in Outlook can more tightly integrated into your daily information workflow. In my next post I'll focus on how to use Rules and Alerts to easily bring relevent feeds to a specific folder, and enable a bunch of other cool scenarios.

On the Ribbon...

michaelaffronti — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 11:36:00 GMT

Let me start by saying I appreciate all of the feedback that everyone has been throwing my way on the "Share Me" post from a few days ago. Much of the feedback has centered on the new "Ribbon" interface which is shown in a screenshot in my post.

One of the challenges that comes from blogging about yet-to-be-released software is that you can't always show the "latest and greatest" UI or functionality until certain points during the release schedule. The screenshots I showed were from Beta 1 (which was several months ago) and used old versions of the Ribbon, the old RSS icon, and several other parts of the old compose Sharing Message.

The Ribbon interface is part of the new Office 2007 UI that Jensen Harris, PM on the User Experience team for Office, has been blogging about for several months now.

Jensen's blog is a great read on the design, implementation, and feedback of the new Ribbon interface and its span across all of the applications in the Office 2007 suite. This link is a collection of the posts Jensen wrote in a series that explains why the Ribbon is in Office 2007: https://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/category/11720.aspx.

I strongly encourage everyone who provided feedback on the Ribbon to give Jensen's blog a read. It has great detail and provides a ton of screenshots that offer context for all the UI elements. As the next few months roll by, you can expect to see the latest and greatest Ribbon iterations in our Beta 2 builds.

Again, thanks for all of the feedback and for keeping up with my blog.

Simple Sharing Extensions

michaelaffronti — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 03:03:00 GMT

This has been around a bunch, but I figured I would give it due dilligence and post a link to the MSDN article that describes the infrastucture and provides examples:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/

It's VERY cool technology that I've had the opportunity to mess around with, and it's potential to be a very slick and simple transport method between applications (especially PIM types) moving forward is awesome.

Anyone implemented it anywhere in an interesting way?