Overview

Personalize

Refresh

Team Members

Help

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Define your Team Members


Description of this Team:	Save Cancel
Read into this Team Calendar.	Ask for refresh when loading this page
Apply following Filter on all items on retrieval.	Include recurring appointments
Show workday overview from until in minutes interval.	Show Overview at startup

Team Calendar

Outlook Team Calendar Application V 2.2

Overview

Outlook Team Calendar is a Personal Outlook 2000 Folder Homepage.

The idea is to have a single view of choosen Team Member appointments as well as enable quick access to their individual calendars and their free/busy times.

Requirements: You need to run this page from within Outlook 2000 and you need access to Microsoft Exchange Server to use Team Calendar.

Where is the software to install from?
When you read this page you already have all the neccesary code you need ;-)
Team Calendar detects if you are viewing this page from an Outlook folder homepage or outside Outlook i.e. in Internet Explorer. In this last case, it only shows this help pane and hides the rest of the Team Calendar application.

Team Calendar uses your existing Outlook Objects, the Outlook View Control, Collaboration Data Objects, Dynamic (D)HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, Configuration Management via the Registry, all of this within this *one* single HTML-File - named "teamcal.htm".

No additional code is required as the Team Calendar downloads CDO and the Outlook View Control directly from the Internet, if not already installed.

Setting Up the Team Calendar

To setup the Team Calendar do the following:

First you should save this page - teamcal.htm - somewhere onto your harddisk, e.g. C:\My Documents\teamcal.htm.
Create an outlook subfolder anywhere you want - e.g. a subfolder of your mailbox's calendar folder, with a name of your choice. The folder must be of type calendar - contains appointment items - and doesn't have to be your own calendar folder. You should use your mailbox store or a personal store for this folder and not a public folder as this is supposed to be a personal solution and the settings of this are all stored in your registry and not in the folder itself.
Right-click your newly created folder, choose "Properties" and activate the "Home Page" tab. Use the "Browse..." button to pickup this file ("teamcal.htm") from where you saved it in Step 1 and make sure to activate the "Show home page by default for this folder" checkbox.
Use the Personalize button on the folder homepage to define your own title message, refresh properties, filters and the days you want to look ahead.
Define your team members (which uses CDO for the addressbook dialog - it will prompt you to install CDO if neccesary) and make sure you've at least read access to your team member calendars. Whenever you change your team members or filter preferences the page will refresh automatically after saving the changes with the Save button.

N.B. If you choose to download CDO from the Microsoft Website you have to install and register CDO manually. See the readme.txt which comes with the download for instructions how to do this. The preferred - and easier - option is to install CDO from your Office/Outlook 2000 setup where you can add it from the list of available components.

Personalize and Configure the Team Calendar

You define the members of a Team Calendar with the Team Members button to define, edit or delete your Team Members. This team definition - as all other configuration settings - is persisted in your user registry and is part of your user profile.
N.B. Team Members are saved with both their display name and their X.400 address as their primary lookup key.

The page can be configured to automatically refresh on load. The Refresh button can also be used to refresh at any time you want. Every refresh will first delete all existing appointments within the Team Calendar.

The last refresh filter and refresh time always show up in the page header for your information.
The Team Calendar application filters all team member calendars for appointments based on both the time and filter you choose and copies these items into the team calendar.

The result is a condensed view of all your Team Member appointments. To distinguish the source of the appointment all subjects are prefixed with the Team Member's name as eg. "[Roman Lutz]: my subject". The Team Member's name is also copied to the "OptionalAttendees" field of the generated Team Calendar appointment to mark the source of the appointment and allow easy grouping / filtering of individual Team Members.

To allow quick access to the Team Member individual calendars a "navigation bar" is build to open each Team Member's individual calendar from this folder homepage. The page layout should automatically fit into your folder's pane.

The Personalize button allows the configuration of the Team Calendar. It shows you a configuration pane where you can set your preferences about each individual Team Calendar. The time intervals you want to read ahead are called the "Timefilter". In addition to the time interval you can add another property filter from the filter dropdown combo box.
There are already some pre-configured property filters from which you can choose or - with the first option in the list named "<Custom Filter>" - define your own property filter. To launch the Custom Filter Editor you have to Right-click this first option and enter a valid filter expression.

Valid filters are Boolean expressions concatenated with "NOT", "AND", "OR". The expression only accepts static values and all outlook properties you use in your expression have to be surrounded with square brackets "[]".

An example of a valid custom filter would be: [Categories] = "Holiday". This example can also be found in the filterlist at the very end. See the Outlook Visual Basic Online Help for more information about user-defined filters.

N.B. some custom filters - as e.g. the last Holiday filter require you to clear the "include recurring appointments" checkbox to get any results back from the custom filter. Be also aware that Outlook property names depend on the installed language for Outlook, e.g. the correct name for the "Categories" property in a German Outlook installation is "Kategorien".

Even if you are running Outlook 2000 US and do not need to localize the Team Calendar you may want to have a look at the "teamcal-german.reg" file to learn how you can add more then one custom filter to the Team Calendar filterlist.

Do not double-click the "teamcal-german.reg" file on an US Outlook installation, as this would localize the "Start" property to the name "Beginn" -German- and never get any appointments into your Team Calendar.

If you get messed up with this regfile by accident you may want to (carefully) delete all values starting with "DD_TeamCal_Localized_" under the registry key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\Today].

Using more than one Team Calendar

You can use this solution in as many folders as you want simultaneously - each of it with it's one team definition. The name of each folder containing an instance of a Team Calendar has to be unique accross all stores (as the folder name is used as key).

Offline Support of Team Calendar

The Team Calendar has great offline support. If you mark the Team Calendar folder for offline usage - or use them within a PST store - you can easily take the Team Calendar offline. The Team Calendar auto-detects if you are running online or offline from your Exchange Server and disables UI components in offline mode.

Defining Team Members, the Free/Busy Overview, refreshing or accessing the individual Team Member calendars is not possible when working offline. Disabled components are shown with a line-through effect like disabled.

Language Support

Team Calendar should run fine on any Windows version with Outlook 2000 US and any language settings without any changes. If you encounter errors in your filter during refresh showing date problems, try to synchronize your user dateformat with the system dateformat. See the below Possible Date Issues section to learn more about why this can happen and how to resolve this issue.

To run Team Calendar on NON-US languages of Outlook 2000 you will have to apply (merge) the corresponding localization registry file, e.g. "teamcal-german.reg" if your Outlook installation language is German. For any language you want to use in your Team Calendar - for languages other than US, GERMAN or FRENCH - you first have to create a registry file based on the German template and change it to your needs. (see the inline comments in the "teamcal-german.reg" file to learn how to create a new template or how to use parts of this registry file to add additional custom filters).

Possible Date Issues

If your system dateformat settings are not or cannot be the same as your user dateformat settings, then Team Calendar has to calculate a reference dateformat guessing your user dateformat. This is neccesary because the used VBScript function FormatDateTime() uses the system dateformat settings but the Outlook Find() and Restrict() methods work with the user dateformat settings and would only get results back, if the user locale is the same as the system locale - regardless in which language you are working.

If that does not work you'll get a filter error message back from the Team Calendar. To be sure that you really have this date problem - and if you need this sync - try to apply the "All Apointments" filter and use the "This month" timefilter.

To synchronize the user with the system settings you should check the "set as system default locale" checkbox in the "Regional Settings" control panel applet (NT4) or use the "Set default..." button of the "Regional Options" (Windows 2000). This may require the Windows Installation CD and you will have to reboot your system after changing the system locale.

Warranty

THE TEAMCAL.HTM AND EMBEDDED SCRIPT CODE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.