Outlook Reminders for a Shared Calendar

[Curtiss]

We are using Exchange Server 2007. The PC's are using Outlook 2007 & 2010.

We have a shared calendar that the company uses. Currently, only the creator of the calendar gets reminders for the daily events on the shared calendar. We would like all those who have access to the shared calendar to get the reminders.

Is there a way to do this?

Is there a way to select who can get reminders or is it all or just the creator of the calendar?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

No, this is not possible in Outlook 2007 - if you use Outlook 2010 and the shared folder is in a shared mailbox (not a public folder) reminders will fire IF you add the mailbox to the profile as a second exchange mailbox (a new feature in Outlook 2010).




There is a utility that can do this in both versions though - reminder manager by slovaktech.com. http://www.slovaktech.com/remindermanager.htm

 

[pietmuis]

Hi Diane, can you please explain how to "add the mailbox to the profile as a second exchange mailbox"? How i think you do it is not a new feature in Outlook and is not working, so i guess i do not know how to do it?

Thanks!

 

[misterfink]

Sorry to bump an oldish thread, but I am also grappling with this issue...

Using Outlook 2010 32-bit, with Exchange 2010.

Until now I have only ever used Outlook for basic read/send tasks, so please excuse me if I am not using the correct terminology!

In Calendar/My Calendars, I created a Calendar that is to show maintenance outages for a complex network I look after. I shared this calendar with everyone in my department.

My idea was for each outage, I would schedule an appointment with a 5 min reminder. After googling a bit and ending up here, I now understand that as I discovered, only I get the 5 min reminder.

I understand that one option is to make each Outage a meeting as opposed to an appointment, and invite everyone as an attendee that needs to be reminded about the outage. I can disable the response request, and each person will receive an email about the outage 'meeting' and they will get a reminder regardless of where they accept or just don't respond (I tested this and it worked). My issue with this is that I am going to generate a lot of emails in people's inboxes and I want to avoid this.

Is there another step I could take to stop an email being sent to everyone?

The other considerations are that 1) I won't always be the person who creates the Outage "Meeting" 2) I use Outlook on various machines around the building.

Thank you for any help anyone can provide.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Generally speaking, using outlook on multiple computers won't be a problem as you are using Exchange. However, it means you can't use VBA to do any fun stuff - like send an email a few minutes before the outage (i'd probably go for 15 min here.) If you are notifying everyone to expect network connectivity problems in the next few minutes, then a dialog that pops up on everyone computer would be better - but that feature may be blocked. See Net Send for more information.

On the outlook side, there really isn't a good solution for notifying others when a reminders fires. The big thing is whether you are notifying everyone in the network or just other admins.

 

[misterfink]

On the outlook side, there really isn't a good solution for notifying others when a reminders fires. The big thing is whether you are notifying everyone in the network or just other admins.

Thank you very much for your reply, Diane.

Yes, netsend is disabled on all our machines.

I only need to notify the operators in my department, who are the only people the calendar has been shared with.

I think I will just have to go with the meeting route. I was thinking that if people began complaining about the amount of emails the meeting notifications were generating, I could begin generating a alphanumeric string to include as a suffix in all subject lines, and then people could just set up a rule to dump all mail with said suffix to their trash.

If you or someone has time, can someone explain why what I and others want to ideally achieve isn't possible? Is it a privacy issue? Or just the way that Outlook handles shared Calendars? When I was googling about this issue there seemed to be an awful lot of people who were trying to achieve an identical or very similar goal.

Thank you again

 

[Forum Admin]

The subject tag is a good idea - and you might be able to set it to expire too - if your company uses mailbox manager to clean up expired mail (or you use autoarchive) it can be deleted automatically. I'm just not sure if you can expire meetings. It's an option on File > Properties in an open meeting form.

It is just how outlook handles shared calendars. If everyone opened the mailbox as a second mailbox (ie, as the mailbox owner), the reminders should fire if the user has reminders enabled. Other than that, it is due to privacy as well as "reminder spam" - if you have 20 shared calendars in your profile, you could be receiving reminders all day. There are weird people (like me!) who make appointments for everything. In my case, I create a lot of test appt - I had to disable reminders on my iPad because it was too annoying to get all the test reminders.

 

[misterfink]

Understood

Thank you for the advice and explanations!

 

[HierkommtdieMaus]

Thank you for the information already provided. I have added the shared mailbox as second Exchange mailbox for three of my colleagues. Two of them now get the reminder pop-up as with their personal calendar. However, the third colleague doesn't. He says he *does* get reminders from his personal Exchange calendar, just not from the secondary shared one. Do you have any idea what could cause this behaviour?

Thanks a lot in advance.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Close Outlook and restart using the /cleanreminders switch.

Also, if anyone dismisses the reminder, it may dismiss it on the other computers, depending on the sync state.