Publish your Outlook calendar on the web for free

I'd been meaning to share this tidbit for a while and then I saw it published in this month's PC World magazine which jogged my memory. Have you ever wanted to share your Outlook calendar with others? It doesn't matter that they don't use Outlook or that you're not on the same Exchange server as them. You can publish your Outlook calendar right to the web and invite your friends to see some or all of your schedule data. They will need a Windows Live or MSN account, but aside from that requirement, it's easy and free to share your Outlook calendar. Let me walk you through the simple steps.

First up, I'm using Outlook 2007 and I created a free account with Microsoft's Office Online service which makes it a snap. In the Calendar view, just look for the middle section on the left that provides many calendar options. Click the one called "Publish my calendar" and you'll see the following dialog box.

Here you can choose which calendar to publish, the time span of appointments to include, the amount of details visible and permissions. The detail amounts are available in three options:

• Availability only, which shows time blocks as Free, Busy, Tentative or Out of Office
• Limited details, which adds the appointment subject to the time availability
• Full details, which includes everything expect attachments

Choose your options and Click OK to have your calendar published directly to Microsoft's Office Online service. Once it's published, you'll be prompted to invite people to view your calendar:

I had originally sent an invitation to James's jkOTR e-mail address, but he couldn't sign in to the Office Online site with that ID. Since the service required a Windows Live e-mail address, I had to resend it to his Live account address. Outlook generated an e-mail invitation for him to view my calendar details so he was all set.

Clicking on the invitation link or Outlook provided URL to the calendar brings up a simple but useful calendar view in the browser:

My online calendar is updated at regular intervals so my appointments are generally always in sync. There's also a "Last updated" date and time in the online calendar so your buddies will know how current your appointments are.

If you work in a small, virtual group spread out in multiple locations, this is a nice way to share your calendar data. You don't have to use the Microsoft Office Online service to host your calendars, so if you have a web server capable that supports WebDAV, you can host it yourself.

Comments

[Pankaj]

does this allow for two way publishing? as in, are changes made to the online calendar synched back? can access to the published calendar be controller? i think these are necessary functions for "shared calendaring". there are some tools which do this. HyperOffice is one. truly "shared" calendars are those to which access can be managed, and all those who have access to the shared should be able to make changes, which are then synched back to their Outlook accounts. hyperoffice does this.