Microsoft Entourage and access to other people's calendars
Microsoft Entourage has different levels of access to other people's Exchange calendars.
Free/busy status
A person's free/busy status shows only whether his or her time is available or not. It does not show any further detail, such as why that person is busy. There are currently four levels of free/busy status:
- Free
- Busy
- Out of the office
- Tentative
With Entourage v.X and 2004, you can see the free/busy status of any other Exchange calendar user at RIT. Publishing free/busy data is essentially automatic, and cannot easily or reliably be turned off for any specific person. You can see the free/busy data when you create a new calendar event in Entourage -- just invite people to it and click on the "Scheduling" tab to view their free/busy information.
Calendar contents
If you want to see more than the free/busy status allows -- such as what is on the calendar -- you will need to open your calendar up for others to view. You can grant permissions for individuals or groups to view and even edit your calendar.
Viewing other people's calendars requires at least Entourage 2004; it does not work with Entourage v.X. While Microsoft Entourage 2004 can view other people's calendars, it presents everyone's calendar data -- including your own -- together in one calendar grid. Many people find this inconvenient, and may want to use a different calendar client, such as Microsoft Outlook 2001, when delegation or sharing is needed. You may switch between another client and Entourage 2004, and even run both on the same computer at the same time.
Changing the permissions to open up your calendar also requires Microsoft Outlook on Windows or "Mac OS classic" as of this writing (see Exchange MAPI and IMAP access from a Macintosh). Microsoft Entourage, through version 2004, is itself unable to change permissions on calendars even though it can use the permissions when they are set correctly. However, the Microsoft Entourage 2004 on-line help does describe how to change the appropriate delegate permissions in Microsoft Outlook on Windows, and we strongly suggest you follow those instructions. (Some kinds of calendar sharing permissions common in Outlook on Windows do not work with Entourage unless you follow the instructions in the on-line help.)