Is there a way to publish busy/free schedule in a Public Folder?

[Guest]

We use Public Folder Calendars quite a bit to schedule resources such as
meeting rooms. A lot of us use the meeting request and "invite" the meeting
room in order to book it for the meeting. It would be really nice if we
could see the busy/free schedule in the meeting request. We don't want to
create a user for the room just so we can do that. Anyone come up with any
other solution?

While we are at it, I wish Microsoft would add other features to Public
Folder Calendars that are available in a user's calendar, such as holidays.
Is there a wish list somewhere so I can post this and hope future releases
will include it? Thanks.
--Sandy

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

you can copy holidays to PF - but don't count on improvements to PF as
Microsoft is moving them from a future version of Exchange server.

 

[Guest]

Thanks. We are already moving some things from Public Folders to our
intranet so looks like we need to be looking into another solution for
resource scheduling as well. Does Microsoft have a preferred solution for
doing resource scheduling that anyone here is familiar with? Hate to buy 3rd
party solutions if we already have the tools.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

The replacement will be SharePoint 12 and 13 (and future versions of windows
SharePoint services) - the current shipping version offers calendaring and
one way sync, but 12 and 13 will have 2 way sync with outlook.

 

[Guest]

Hi Diane,

You mentioned that you can copy holidays to PF. I assume by this you
mean copying one at a time by drag an drop or something similar? Is there a
way to use something like the Add Holidays feature in the Calendar Options
dialog that adds holidays to your personal calendar, but have them instead
added to a PF calendar? Thanks for any help.

==John Cuthbertson