Making Free/Busy Information Available to Other Companies

Sometimes you will want to let external organizations have access to your users’ free/busy time information, so that they can more efficiently organize meetings with your staff. Note that doing this does not give other companies access to the description or detail of any of your staff’s appointments, but just when they are and when they are not available.

Since Softalk Share Server uses standard calendaring protocols for exchanging free/busy information, it too can be optionally used to provide other organizations with this information. If you wish to share this information with other organizations, ensure that the Softalk Share Server server is accessible from the Internet on port 8109. Then, provide the relevant companies with the free/busy addresses of your users. The format of the free/busy address is as follows:

http://your-server-ip:8109/%NAME%

The free/busy address can be entered into the Internet Free-Busy Address field of the Details tab of the relevant contact property sheet. Alternatively, if the external company is planning only to access your free/busy server and no other free busy servers, then they can enter the above address into the Search Location field of the Free/Busy Options property sheet. Doing this is far more convenient than entering the free/busy address into every contact that represents a member of staff in your organization. The Free/Busy Options property sheet is accessible by selecting Tools | Options and pressing the Calendar Options button and then pressing the Free/Busy Options button.

Outlook will replace %NAME% with the first part of the user’s email address. So an equivalent address for John Doe (an example from the previous section) would be:

http://your-server-ip:8109/john.doe

The advantage of using the first syntax is that it will handle all users, rather than just one specific user.