Outlook 2003 to schedule employees?

[kman42]

Hi all!

I'm new to the forum and not really much of a Windows user, but I have an Outlook question for my wife. She is involved in supervising about 100 people at 20 different sites. They are trying to set up a master calendar or a set of calendars in Outlook 2003/Exchange to keep track of where all these people are. There are 2 other people involved in their supervision and about 5 people who need to know the schedules of all these people. Currently only the supervisors use Outlook 2003/Exchange; the 100 people just get a copy of the schedule, but they may all be added on to the Outlook system in the next few months. They are trying to figure out the best way to implement this. They have considered a single calendar, but this seems unwieldy as about 60 people would be on the calendar for any given day. They have also considered 20 calendars, one for each site. Or one big calendar with a different category for each site. I've also seen some information on the Group scheduling feature. Is there an accessory program for Outlook that might this sort of thing? A better program?

They currently use an Excel spreadsheet that the main scheduler person works up, but this is obviously difficult to share and hard for other people to have input on. Although it does make for a nice table: people down the left, days of the month across the top, site location in each cell. This way each employee knows where they should be on each day.

Anyone else face a similar situation or have any suggestions?

kman

[-pops-]

Hello kman and welcome to WF.

I'm sure someone will be along soon who will be able to help you out. :smile:

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Hello, and welcome!

We do a similar thing at our office, with about 20 employees, although very loosely. People just put in when they are out of office, or if they have a meeting scheduled at the office.

I think one calendar with 100 employees will probably be too much, but you could try it and see how it looks. But possibly 20 different calendars would be better. It's really something they should try first.

I don't know how many people here are familiar withOutlook/Exchange; there are some specialized newsgroups for Outlook and for Exchange - you could also try to ask there. I am not 100% sure - as I am not at the office now - I believe one of the newsgroups for Outlook is microsoft.public.outlook.general; there are a number of regular MVPs there.

[scuzzman]

I don't think Outlook would be the way to go. What you could use is a MySQL (or another database such as Access) and a PHP/Perl/ASP/VB frontend on a webpage as the timeclock interface (with an employee id and password, Clock In/Out, etc). This might be of some assistance. I know the links are on a Linux forum, but PHP/ASP/Perl are platform independent and there are Windows ports of most of the needed software, so the software should work.