Calendar and Contacts Sharing Without Exchange

[tbeehler]

Hello All,

This post is a wee long, but I wanted to be as clear as possible and I wanted to help out some people who might be banging their heads on their desks right now pouring over code and dealing with an irate CIO or CTO. Enjoy! Also, a big thanks to all of you out there who've helped me in the past who's tips have yanked my butt from the fire many a time.

I found these few tips very helpful when Exchange crashed our servers (don't even ask, it wasn't pretty and I'm never going back to Exchange.) Anyways, The first thing you'll need to do is create a small, local, anonymous FTP site within your LAN. Then go into Outlook (we're using Outlook 2000, so you're milage may vary) and go into Tools, then options, then calendar options. Enable the Free/Busy schedule. In the line where it asks where you're site is, tell it: ftp://192.168.0.2/whatever.vfb Of course, you're IP and name of your vfb file will vary. I usually use first initial, last name for my vfb files, so my particular one looks like ftp://192.168.0.2/tbeehler.vfb This is VERY important. I mispelled the extension of the file and it didn't work. Also, you may need the web publishing wizard/patch (not sure exactly what it's called) so you can publish this info the ftp site. You can test it out by clicking on Tools, Send/Recieve, Free/Busy and it should say something along the lines of "Sent successfully". I apologize if my words aren't exact, I'm doing this from memory. Once that's done, you need to put in the free/busy information in the contact itself. Same format goes here: Ftp://192.168.0.2/whatever.vfb Once they have successfully setup their free busy info and you have as well and you both have sent/recieved your respective free/busy schedules, you should be able to see it when you schedule a meeting. Now, on to contacts sharing.

Contacts sharing.

I created this small VB script below that runs at logon in our domain. You will have to put in your own information of course, and you can copy and paste to your hearts content. This window wraps some of the text in the code, so you may have to edit it a bit. The only thing I ask, is that you freely distribute this code, but at least give myself and the gentleman mentioned credit for the code. Also, you may freely email me with any questions that you may have. Thanks.

Travis L. Beehler
Network Administrator


Start Script ><

' ***************************************************
' Script To Create an Outlook Contact
'
' New Contact Item with Free/Busy Schedule Info
' Scripting by:
'
' Travis L. Beehler
' travis@thebeehlers.com
'
' Partial Code examples & Inspiration from:
'
' Danny J. Lesandrini August 28, 2000
' datafast@home.com
'

http://datafast.cjb.net

'
'
' This script will uses COM Automation to access
' the Outlook Object Model in order to create a new
' Contact item.
'
'
' Note that the CreateObject call uses the generic
' reference, &quot;Outlook.Application&quot; with no version
' number. This assures that the script won't break
' just because the client machine doesn't contain
' the correct version of MS Outlook. The script
' will break, however, if no version of Outlook is
' found on the client machine
'
' ***************************************************
Dim objOutlook
Dim itmContact
Dim strMsg

Const olContactItem = 2
Set objOutlook = CreateObject(&quot;Outlook.application&quot
Set itmContact = objOutlook.CreateItem(olContactItem)
itmContact.FullName = &quot;Travis L. Beehler&quot;
itmContact.EMail1Address = &quot;travis@thebeehlers.com&quot;
itmcontact.InternetFreeBusyAddress = &quot;ftp://192.168.0.2/tbeehler.vfb&quot;
itmContact.FileAs = &quot;Travis L. Beehler&quot;
itmContact.BusinessTelephoneNumber = &quot;Extension 411&quot;
itmContact.Save

'Clean up
Set itmContact = Nothing
Set objOutlook = Nothing