Availability Viewer

The Availability Viewer is a Microsoft Outlook 97/98 form to show you who (or what) is free and who is busy at any given time. It is intended to be just a viewer, not a form for scheduling meetings. You can use it to track the schedule of a group of people who work together or to check when a conference room is free for a meeting. It requires Microsoft Exchange Server.

The latest version (ver 1.1, 18 May 1998) adds VBScript to turn the Standard toolbar off when you open the form and restore it before the form is closed, in an effort to keep it from being sent accidentally. See Known Problems below.

Installation | Usage | Known Problems | Further Ideas

Installation

Download the Availvue.zip file, then unzip it and open Availability Viewer.oft in Outlook. Choose Disable Macros. (Choosing Enable Macros seems to make it impossible to publish the form.)
Click Invite Others and select the people or resources whose availability you want to track.
Follow the procedure below for publishing the form in Outlook 97 or Outlook 98. I suggest that you publish it to the Calendar folder with Viewer as the form name. This will add the command New Viewer to the Compose menu.

You could also publish two instances of the form -- one to view colleagues' schedules (perhaps call it Staff Viewer) and a separate instance, with a different set of All Attendees, to view resources (perhaps call it Resource Viewer).

To publish a form with Outlook 97:

In the open item that you want to publish as a form, choose File | Publish Form As.
In the Publish Form As dialog box, enter a Form name, which will be used to select the form from the folder menu or forms library.
Click Publish In and select the location where you want to publish the form, then click OK.
Back in the Publish Form As dialog, click Publish.

To publish a form with Outlook 98:

In the open item that you want to publish as a form, choose Tools | Forms | Publish Form.
In the Publish Form As dialog box, use the Look In list and Browse button to select the location where you want to publish the form.
Give the form a Display name, which will be used to select the form from the folder menu or forms library, and Form name.
Click the Publish button.

After publishing, the form is installed and ready to use.

Published form locations

Outlook forms can be published to three different types of form "libraries":

Personal Forms	Library of forms stored in your Personal Folders or Exchange Server mailbox.
Organization Forms	Library of forms stored on the Exchange Server for group use. You need permission from the Exchange Server administrator to publish to this library.
Folder Forms	Library of forms associated with a particular folder, either in your mailbox or Personal Folders or in a public folder on the Exchange Server.

Usage

To use the Availability Viewer form, choose Calendar | New Viewer (assuming you published it to the Calendar folder with a form name of Viewer). If you published it to the Organization Forms library, use Compose | Choose Form (Outlook 97) or Tools | Forms | Choose Form (Outlook 98). When the form opens, it sets the appointment time to right now. Click the AutoPick button to move to the schedule for today, or just move to another date and time. You will see the busy periods for everyone listed under All Attendees. To see more information, right-click any time period marked as Tentative, Busy or Out of Office.

The Availability Viewer itself does not schedule appointments, only display free/busy status. (The form has the Reply and Forward actions disabled and also includes a script to prevent it from being sent as a meeting request.) However, from the Appointment (Outlook 97) or Actions (Outlook 98) menu, you can choose New Appointment to create a new appointment without returning to the main Outlook window.

While you can't add the Availability Viewer form to the Outlook toolbar, you can add it to the Office shortcut bar. See Can I customize the Microsoft Outlook toolbar and menus? in the Outlook FAQ.

Known Problems

Even though the script for the form includes code that should prevent it from being sent, sometimes the form is sent anyway. This seems to be particularly true under Outlook 98. The current version hides the Standard toolbar to make it harder to send the form; a user could still use File | Send or Ctrl+Enter, though, to send the form.

Further Ideas

Several people have suggested interesting ideas for enhancing this form. I plan to try to add them as time permits:

Pop up a dialog asking you to choose among several sets of resources or workgroup colleagues, then display the desired resources based on your choice. This would let you handle all availability viewing on one form, rather than publishing a separate copy of the form for each group you want to view.
Automatically update the form to see any changes to resources' availability.

This freeware program was provided by Sue Mosher. It first appeared as a project in the April 1998 issue of the Exchange Administrator Newsletter from Windows NT magazine.

For more Outlook forms, see Microsoft Outlook Forms Samples.