Hello everyone. My organisation is using windows small business server 2011 and we're having some issues with the exchange/outlook calendar system.
We want to have one main calendar shared across the organisation, so that our chairperson can look at it and see what everyone is doing at any particular time. We're using windows PC's and iPhone devices to view this, so any solution needs to be mobile compatible.
The current solution we've found is adding each person's individual calendar to the chairperson's iPhone, and that shows him it all as one merged calendar. The problem with this is that he also recieves a copy of all notifications, meeting requests/invitations, and other such things, which he does not need. This causes a lot of unnecessary notification traffic. Essentially it's not just letting him view those calendars, but is treating him as that calendar's user/operator as well.
A solution i'm currently looking at is setting up one main Organisation calendar, to which everyone would add all their engagements and appointments. Then people would only need to look at this to see what everyone is up to. This doesn't seem too hard, however there are a few major issues with that approach that i need help to solve before we can implement it:
1. We still need the ability for people to invite others in the organisation to specific meetings/events through the calendar system, thusly everyone still needs to have their own individual calendar and account.
2. Given the above, we'd need some way of allowing events/meetings (and their attendees) to be automatically copied to the shared/organisation calendar, as we can't reasonably expect everyone in the organisation to add things twice.
does anyone have any advice or thoughts regarding this problem? I know that the use of iPhones (as opposed to windows phones) might cause issues here, but people don't like change very much, and new phones are costly so i don't think changing mobile phones is an option.
Also related, i've noticed that the SBS includes an internal company website, which has it's own "Organisation calendar" on it. I'm at a loss for finding any information on how to use this feature though, or what can be done with it. I'm looking at the microsoft reference page for the feature (which i can't link)
It tells me to read the "Information worker's guide" for more indepth information about these features and gives me a supposed link to that guide. However the link infact goes nowhere, it only links to another copy of the exact same page. Which is clearly useless.