Knowledge Base

How to use the Internet Free/Busy feature in Outlook 98 (IMO)

Article ID: 180199

Article Last Modified on 7/11/2006

APPLIES TO

This article was previously published under Q180199
Note These procedures only apply if you have installed Outlook with the Internet Mail Only option. To determine your installation type, click About Microsoft Outlook on the Help menu. If you have the Internet Mail Only option installed, you see "Internet Mail Only".

For information about the differences between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express e-mail clients, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

257824 OL2000: Differences Between Outlook and Outlook Express

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.

    Note In this URL format, the user name and the password are passed with clear text to the server.

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:

171229 How to add and remove Internet Explorer components

Keywords: kbhowto kbdta KB180199


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