I like the ability of Office Live to integrate into the Outlook calendars and contact functionality - but I have 3 problems that I have found and would like to get feedback from others for fixing/working around these problems.
1. When creating an "All Day" event in Time Manager (by checking the flag in Office Live), the event is displayed in GMT in Outlook (5 hours behind EST). I believe that this may be a bug. Outlook shows a start and end time (instead of checking the "All Day Event" flag in Outlook). Events that are not "All Day" events show up correctly. Yes, I have changed the admin account, list, and user account settings to be reflecting of EST.
2. Is there any way to show events from all users in a single Calendar view in Time Manager I like the availability and scheduling features, but there is no way to show events across all users on one calendar. The "Week (Group)" view is the closest, but with 30 calendars, it only shows them a few at a time. This calendar view also doesn't integrate to Outlook (just individual monthly calendars). I could create a WSS Calendar list to do this very easily, but I lose all of the resource availability features.
3. The Company Administration -> Employee Directory list inegrates to Outlook with only a couple of fields (First Name, Last Name, Email, Home Phone, and Work Address). I would def like to see Job Title, Business Phone, and Mobile Phone integrate at a minumum. All of the fields already exist in the Office Live list - but the mapping to Outlook needs to be updated to push more of the information to Outlook.
Any thoughts would be appreciated. If these are enhancements - it would be great to have them in put front of the right people. Making the tool more integrated to Outlook increases business value and is a great marketing tool for Microsoft.
Calendaring and Outlook Integration
adorer
Hello Nick,
Thank you very much for your feedback on Office Live integration with Outlook. I've followed up with individuals regarding the 3 problems:
1. Currently, the "All Day" event synchronization in WSS does not support the "All Day Event" flag in Outlook 2003. However, it is supported and works as expected in Outlook 2007. We are looking into the possibility of making this work in Outlook 2003, but for now, one would have to upgrade to the latest Outlook 2007 client to take advantage of this WSS feature.
2. Unfortunately, you're correct here - the "Week (Group)" view is the closest to what you're trying to achieve, and when you have morethan 10 calendars, pagination occurs. Thank you for your feedback on this, and we will take it into consideration in our future releases.
3. Once again, you're correct here - only a limited set of fields are currently set up to connect to synchronize to Outlook. We'll take this feedback into consideration when planning our future releases.
We're always hoping to improve on the usability and feature set of our services, so we would greatly appreciate any feedback you have on Office Live. Thanks for making Office Live better!
Best Regards,
Albert