How to Share Outlook Information

A great new feature of Outlook 2007 is the ability to share your Outlook calendar with others using the internet calendar feature and internet calendar subscriptions. For those users that are not in an Exchange Server environment, this has been the ultimate challenge. Fortunately, Microsoft has included this functionality for Outlook 2007 users, however, it's not full sharing like you might be thinking.

There are a couple of catches or limitations which could be deal breakers for some:

1. Each person - the one sharing their calendar and the people accessing the calendar need to have Outlook 2007 and have a Microsoft Live ID (aka Passport).
2. For the person accessing the calendar, it's read only. They cannot update the calendar, they can only look at it.
3. There is a limit of 2MB of storage space that the Microsoft Calendar Sharing Service offers for all combined shared calendars.

Whether you use a Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or Windows Live Mail account, you can share calendar information with anyone who has access to e-mail or to the Internet.

SharePoint Services does offer 2-way sync between a SharePoint web-based calendar and Outlook 2007, however it's not synced to the default Outlook calendar folder. You actually use Outlook to access, manage, and modify the SharePoint calendar. It's not the other way around.

Microsoft is starting a beta program that's part of the Office Live family called Office Live workspaces. I recently found this and applied for one a few days ago, but haven't received it yet. In addition to documents it does say - "Synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook". I'm curious how that will work and wonder if that will do more of what people need out of sharing. The service will be free. Says it's an online extension of Microsoft Office. Here's a link to that: http://workspace.officelive.com/

All I have to say is...IT'S ABOUT TIME!!!

Check out a video tutorial below to see this in action.

I also wanted to provide a few urls for those of you wanting to work with your clients Outlook data. The easiest is using a remote session via something like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn. But these require that one person be signed into the desktop, so either you or your client would be working with the data, not both of you at the same time. This is not ideal, so I'm listing the alternatives for more real-time data sharing and access.

This list is only a sample of what's out there. I have not used any of them myself, so I cannot say one way or the other if I have a preference. It might come down to money and convenience. The perfect solution is by using Exchange and fortunately for small businesses there are many hosted Exchange services available, such as http://www.usa.net, who also provides hosted SharePoint services as well. Perfect for a complete and inexpensive solution that brings all the bells and whistles to small businesses everywhere, without the expensive up-front costs of having it in-house.

Most of these give you free Outlook 2007 and provide compatibility with MAC/Entourage users as well. Many also offer mobile device sync services for Blackberry, etc.

I welcome your comments at the bottom of this page. Have you struggled with how to share your Outlook information with others?

http://www.usa.net

http://www.link2exchange.com/

www.mailstreet.com/

http://www.eoutlook.com/

http://www.frontpages-web-hosting.com/

http://www.intermedia.net/

www.123together.com/